‘Un martillo en la cabeza’ [A hammer in the head], the first exhibition in the gallery by the artist Damaris Pan that brings together a selection of recent paintings inhabited by the characteristic lenguage of forms, textures, and color palette of the Basque  author and that is framed within the artistic programming of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend 2022.


Un martillo en la cabeza [A Hammer in the head] arises from an extirpation that Damaris Pan makes of the title of the third episode of the series Berlin Alexanderplatz, by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A Hammer Blow To The Head Can Injure The Soul is the title of Fassbinder to which Damaris Pan refers, and brings to mind the onomatopoeic Franz Biberkopf, a grotesque character, representative image of the interwar lumpen. Un martillo en la cabeza also sounds like an ACME device, the ending of a chase between Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. And I do not say this for no reason, there is a lot of all this in Damaris Pan’s painting, a lot of onomatopoeia and irony. It might be the reason why her way of talking about painting is free of affectation, because despite pouring her soul into it, she is able to define as peanuts some recurring forms that appear on her paintings, which are real, sometimes they really are peanuts, and evoke Carlos Alcolea’s Las gafas del pintor (1978). They are reminiscent of them since, in Alcolea’s painting, those glasses refer to a Möbius strip that in turn would represent his vision of painting. A strip without a delimited interior or exterior, a non-orientable surface that could be those peanuts of Damaris Pan, or the peanuts could be a Möbius strip, an idea of infinity filled with that colour that until recently was called flesh tone. Whose flesh? Nobody’s flesh. Skins, if anything, which appear in each of her paintings. Painting peanuts to dilute perhaps the notion of limit, or perhaps for the opposite, to create that room of one’s own of gentle shapes, sometimes soft and viscous, as Louise Bourgeois would do, whose flesh will have a lot to do with Damaris Pan.

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