Xavier Aballí
Nov 13th - Jan 10th, 2027
For many years, Aballí worked as an art teacher. While his students were occupied with their assignments, he would often make something alongside them, using the same stretches of time and sometimes the materials they had left behind. Some of the works in the exhibition emerged in this way. Their beginnings were modest and unprogrammed: not the execution of a previously formulated idea, but a response to whatever happened to be available, paper, paint, a discarded fragment, a pause in the day. Making became a way of inhabiting time.
This freedom runs throughout the exhibition. Watercolour becomes an experiment in what the material itself might do. In some works, translucent grey washes accumulate one over another, their edges stacked in irregular layers; in others, diluted pigment follows the ridges and undulations of the paper, as though the surface were determining the drawing. Colour is allowed to operate without having to illustrate or signify something beyond itself. Elsewhere, monochromatic sheets sit beside black Cosmos populated by stars drawn in white marker, while works titled Intimacy are made from chewing gum transferred directly from the artist’s mouth onto cardboard.
Planetary Systems opens onto a particularly playful territory. Planets, stars and celestial bodies are composed almost intuitively, and coincidence is allowed to become part of the image. In one drawing, a configuration of planets unexpectedly resembles Winnie-the-Pooh. Aballí’s response is not to correct or rationalise the resemblance, but to imagine that somewhere in the universe such a configuration must, at some point, have existed. The proposition is humorous, but it also describes something essential about these works: association is allowed to remain free, without having to become evidence of anything.
The same spirit animates Wildlife, small sculptures made from the metallic foil and cork of cava bottles. Aballí began making them during celebrations, birthdays, weddings, New Year’s Eve, often after dinner, while conversation continued around the table. The gesture begins almost absent-mindedly, like folding a napkin, twisting a straw or playing with whatever happens to be within reach. Gradually, a figure appears: a turkey, a bird, a horse, a snake, a frog, sometimes a human body. An idle gesture becomes a small act of invention.
There is something close to a Dada logic in this suspension of intention, though less as historical quotation than as an attitude towards making: a willingness to allow chance, play, absurdity and the apparently inconsequential to enter the work. A work may begin because a piece of foil happens to be on the table, because water finds a path through paper, because the chewing gum is already in the mouth, because the hand insists on moving.
The installation follows the same principle. The vitrines containing Wildlife occupy the gallery while the surrounding walls are enveloped by works that differ radically in material, scale, date and appearance. Rather than arranging them chronologically, typologically or according to a stable visual logic, the exhibition disperses them across the space almost as an explosion. It is, in this sense, an anti-curatorial composition: an attempt to arrange without overdetermining, to create proximity without forcing the works into a single argument, it gradually takes on the quality of a dreamscape.
The difficulty lies in bringing these things together without imposing a meaning they never claimed to have. Any exhibition produces an order: works are selected, placed beside one another, given a title and made to share a space. Without Knowing Why does not pretend to escape that condition, but tries to keep it loose. Colour, form, humour and coincidence produce affinities, but those affinities do not need to resolve into explanations.
Without Knowing Why proposes that there is value in this freedom. To make without immediately asking what something means, whether it belongs to a series, or how it might be explained is to preserve a space for experimentation and pleasure. Across three decades, these apparently incidental gestures accumulate into a parallel body of work shaped less by a programme than by curiosity: by the possibility of making something simply because, for a moment, it was pleasurable to do so.
For the exhibition, Under the Spell presents Wildlife (2026) as an edition of twenty works. Each sculpture is made from cork, aluminium and steel and varies in form and dimensions. Rather than reproducing a single model, each belongs to the same loose family while remaining distinct. Sales proceeds directly support the future programme of the gallery.
Jéssica Varrichio
November, 2026
November, 2026