Exhibition 'El mirall de Janus' by Carlota Herebia, Concabella Castle

Artist Carlota Herebia presents the exhibition "El mirall de Janus" at Concabella Castle, a collection of recent pieces that evoke the iconography of silent film from the 1920s and 1930s through pictorial language.

Janus is the Roman god capable of contemplating both the past and the future. By looking back, he can simultaneously sense the consequences of future events. This gaze can turn into existential horror if we fail to learn from our mistakes.

The aesthetics of the compositions and the color palette of the exhibition deliberately recreate the monochrome of an old film, with the typical shifts and oxidation effects of silver halides. The characters depicted are not faithful portraits, but rather presences that engage with the viewer and challenge them, claiming their leading role in this story: some shout, others stare at us defiantly, or hide, unwilling to see the future—which is none other than our present. Figures that challenge the equidistant gaze we are accustomed to in a universe saturated with color and striking images.

The work presented by Herebia is an explicit declaration of his fascination with the cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, which served as a mirror of the social tensions, collective fears and political fragility of interwar Germany.

Without resorting to words or discourse, but with great visual and symbolic power, German Expressionism used accentuated shadows and exaggerated interpretations to convey psychological states and extreme emotions. This language allowed filmmakers to unnervingly address the cultural changes of the time and present the city as a space of corruption, decadence, and human disconnection. It is a valuable testament to understanding how artists were able to anticipate, almost prophetically, the dangers of fascism and the subservience of the individual. They addressed issues such as the crisis of traditional masculinity, the class divide in a dystopian society—with the impoverishment of the majority to sustain an enriched elite—and the fear of foreigners, a sentiment later exploited by Nazism.

Faced with the decline of inherited Western values and disenchantment with the effects of Westernization and the institutions that represent it, Carlota Herebia offers us a cry that warns of the risk of repeating the past. She invites us to confront our own shadows and contradictions in an immersive and timeless atmosphere, as if we've found a mirror.

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