Raúl says that images no longer carry credibility or any information about reality, that after artificial intelligence, they are just images. A rose is a rose is a rose. And in the same way, we can have a view of the Alps from the tropics, or talk about freedom while looking at an apocryphal skyline. THE PROMPT increasingly conditions and mediates various aspects of life. Three distinct paintings, same questioning.

The way we create and store memories has changed. It is no longer an old photo album lovingly kept by the family in an intimate space; now they are just public domain data, zeros and ones seen by your "friends" and "followers" one day and the next they are nothing more than information for the algorithm. OUTSOURCING NOSTALGIA —what a beautiful expression— describes the phenomenon and is one of the paintings in this exhibition. And well, if there are people who hire others to hug them, what is strange about hiring a service to delegate memories?

In THE VERIFIED EFFECT I and II, there is a disturbing element: both because of how culturally, distant those Asian characters are from us, and because of the ambiguity of the gesture of those women whose expressions are unclear—whether they are laughing, moaning, or crying. These are seductive, attractive paintings, at the same time strange and disturbing. Like when a robot checks that you are not another robot and a blue checkmark next to your profile picture proves you are who you say you are. 30 seconds of dopamine. Or 2 hours and 23 minutes, which is the average daily time a user spends on social networks. Immediate gratification and chronic depression. What do we understand by happiness today?

Today, life happens at supersonic speeds, and the sense of urgency torments us all the time. Events push against each other, overlap, and intermingle to the point of confusion. This is what happens in INCIDENTE DOMÉSTICO I (Message Spying) and II (Connection Lost), where we do not quite know what is happening, we only see the interior of an elegant living room, the night, and the fire. Is it a hearth fire or the bonfire of discord? Is that lost connection a human connection or an internet connection? Which one is more relevant?

We know that bad news are the most viral ones. Disaster and violence generate a fascinating morbid curiosity (very functional for mass control). Add to this the growing popularity of social networks as sources of information, and what do we have left? The baroque and blurry spectacle of everyday life.

In this new body of work exhibited, there are two peculiarities: on one hand, the aim is to make the pictorial gesture visible, to show dripping, un-erased pencil lines, to highlight the accident. On the other hand, the recurrence of images created with AI. Where before the source was "real", today the artifice is double: the image is created with Artificial Intelligence and then painted.

In all this commentary on today's “brave new world”, these paintings open an ancestral debate: the eternal tension between truth and lie, between fiction and reality. Without taking sides as criticism or apology, they even question the validity of the question, the point of debating whether this or that is true or false. And beyond that, the meaning of artistic representation itself, questioning how useful it is to continue painting today. In any case, the underlying principle of these pieces is the same that has long guided Raúl: to find beauty in everyday life and return it to the world in the form of art.

The strange world increasingly tends towards a happy world. Between José Alfredo Jiménez and Aldous Huxley, the present. This exhibition is an essay on contemporary life. A collection where mystery and fiction intertwine in a narrative that is at times bleak, but above all, always beautiful. Deliberately beautiful. And if you want to know about my past / It is necessary to tell another lie / I will tell you that I came from a strange world / That I do not know pain / that I succeeded in love / And that I have never cried.