Alberto Peral’s proposal intervenes in the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion through its most ethereal constitutive elements: the reflections that dilute the solidity of its walls.
The plunge marks a transition that breaks the membrane between two worlds: the gaze before the dive, able to discern through the air’s transparency, and the body surrounded by the water after slipping beneath the surface. In “A Bigger Splash,” Hockney captured that thrilling moment following the weightlessness of the leap. The change of medium takes our breath away, leaving behind only a fleeting trace of movement in the water.
The Pavilion, with its mirrored effect, constructs an abstract reality where the viewer faces an unreachable reflection, a space where sight advances ahead of touch when meeting the polished surface’s resistance. The flow of space slips through one’s fingers, which are unable to grasp its own imaginary. The columns, simple lines, are suspended, fictionally relieved of the weight they are meant to bear.
The mirrored double that gazes back at us — both an I, both a you — leaves as a remnant the inapprehensibility of a familiar stare that unsettles us. It is in fiction, in this moment of estrangement, where we perceive ourselves as bodies within a space that pierces us with its unreachable ideal.
In "Splashing Mies", Alberto Peral disrupts the only reflection that can be crossed: the disturbance of the waters tears through the very fiction that defines Mies’ reality.
The publication has been produced by Matthew Liu Fine Arts Gallery
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