PEANA is pleased to announce We pass too quickly through this place of birth and death, the first solo exhibition of Adrián S. Bará en PEANA.
The exhibition title is inspired by The Emperor of Poetry, translated from Conquered Nations by Chen Dongdong.
In this body of work, Bará explores themes of the body, the city, and their relationship to architecture and materiality. Working with everyday and found materials—including wood, cardboard, newspaper, and drywall—he critically examines architectural structures and our relationship to them.
Throughout these works, Bará employs plasterboard and cardboard to evoke the constant transformation of the urban landscape surrounding his studio in DUMBO, Brooklyn. In the installation Lo real es aquello a lo que hay que, situated at the center of the exhibition, the tension between the material and the tangible points to questions of labor and work—an enduring concern in the artist’s practice. By working with discarded materials in one of the world’s largest producers of waste, Bará confronts the systems that render both construction materials and the bodies that handle them disposable. While modern design has historically privileged visual form and intellectual frameworks, it has increasingly distanced itself from the body and from sensory experience. The violence embedded in contemporary architecture and urban environments can be understood as a consequence of this neglect of the body and the senses.
Two Towers (2021) consists of two freestanding cardboard towers that evoke the city’s continual transformation and an imaginary of temporary structures destined for perpetual change. In the paintings Poems to the Unknown (2022–2023), Bará poetically explores the tension between industrial materials that standardize and contain society. As these paintings come into being, two parallel processes unfold: the body is both present and released through gestures of paint, while time becomes visible through the incorporation of organic matter—in this case, oranges. This investigation began during an artist residency at Kinosaito in Verplanck, New York, where Bará started experimenting with watercolor beyond the conventions traditionally associated with the medium. In the artist’s own words:
“Painting is like making music: you work with specific notes. Those notes are universal, but the moment you play them, they become unique. A kind of revelation takes place, as water—an elusive force—finds its own course and always its own way.”
Bará’s work frequently presents objects or fragments in states of rupture or decomposition, where something is almost always missing and something else remains suspended on the verge of collapse. For the artist, these are structures concerned with absence and emptiness, but also with the forces, tensions, and potentialities that emerge from them. This phenomenological exchange suggests that the body itself is subject to continual transformation, blurring the distinction between subject and object.
According to Bará, the inclusion of oranges throughout the exhibition also references ideas developed by philosopher and media theorist Vilém Flusser, who argued that human solitude stems from the awareness of our own mortality. Flusser understood humanity to be entering a profound transformation in knowledge through the convergence of politics, ethics, and art. For him, the fundamental reason for human loneliness lies in the certainty of facing death alone. This absolute solitude accompanies us at every moment and remains an ever-present condition of existence. In this sense, Bará’s work becomes an invitation to confront oneself. The presence and condition of these objects serves as a reminder that everything remains in flux and open to question; no structure can ever be considered complete or final. Any sense of completion suggests a form of death, making restoration an attempt to preserve form through the memory of time.
These exchanges come alive through Bará’s site-specific installations, where the artist allows the material itself to guide the work’s development. This approach requires viewers to continuously adapt to both the space and its objects, making their encounter with the installation an active part of what unfolds within it. We pass too quickly through this place of birth and death ultimately invites us to embrace fragility, impermanence, and the fleeting nature of existence.
Natalia Viera Salgado