Cráneo
COAIB
Rafa Forteza
September 2026
What is the original echo chamber, if not the skull? The first room in which we hear our own thoughts. Even before we write them down.This new exhibition with Rafa Forteza begins with a void, a kind of mysterious cavity. If Echo Chamber, inaugurated last January, presented an archive of his visual language through associations and internal resonances, Cráneo shifts our attention to the interior of that same architecture.
To embrace reduction sometimes feels like stepping into the void. Fortunately, three verbs hold us.
I. Turning
At the centre of the gallery, a sculpture slowly turns upon itself. Suspended from the ceiling by an old cord, a wooden hanger supports a body made of fragments and wrappings, almost like a skeleton.
This is a primary space: sculptures based on the gesture of wrapping that Rafa has been developing since the early 1990s. Within it lie pieces of wood, burlap and other materials from the studio. Raw canvas wraps everything in torn strips, as though it were a temporary bandage... something to return to later.
When “later” arrives is for each of us to decide. What matters is coming back. The sculpture comes back to the very profile from which we first encountered it. Its slow movement introduces a different temporality, almost respiratory, becoming the silent axis of the exhibition.
Months ago, while watching it slowly turn in the artist's studio, I thought of Milan Kundera's existential mathematics: "There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting." [1]
II. Repeating
A sequence of drawings and works on paper traces the perimeter of the space. Within them, the face, the mask and the skull are continuously altered. These are forms to which Rafa keeps coming back in a movement oscillating between obsession and contemplation. One head leads to another. Can repetition become a form of thought?
The drawings span from the early 1980s to the present. Throughout them, the skull appears as container and dwelling, a space for vision, language and doubling. One of the lesser-known aspects of Rafa Forteza's practice lies precisely in his many alter egos. They emerged whenever the work itself called for them, allowing him to explore questions he might not have permitted himself as an artist: asking new ones or returning to old ones without face or shadow.
A drawing signed by Pedro Colina in 1997, for instance, depicts a head containing another image within it: a child's house with a thin column of smoke rising from its chimney.
Photography, language and collage repeatedly interrupt the surface of the paper, bringing new concerns to the same head, endlessly transformed. Joseph Beuys' face appears only briefly, just long enough to remind us that thoughts, too, can become sculpture. The skull ceases to function as a container and instead becomes the image of a world permanently in the making.
III. Remaining
Concluding the exhibition is a series of sculptures we call Las Cruces. Made during the 1990s, they were never conceived for a specific exhibition, yet they remained in the studio for decades as an open question that we now return to.
They resemble loaves of bread or cakes, pierced by found materials, repetitive gestures and small objects embedded across their surfaces: nuts, resin fragments, old paintbrushes, buttons, coloured pencils... everything seems to expand from a single core.
At the time, Rafa's concern was to escape the Cartesian perimeter of the canvas. Painting ceased to be understood as a bounded surface and instead became a material territory, a mass capable of exceeding its own limits. Las Cruces invite us to experience the wall differently. Rather than encountering the edge of an image, we encounter a protrusion: the irregular growth of matter that seems to expand from within.
Throughout the exhibition, the skull emerges as a cavity that contains and amplifies. A space where thought intertwines with both old intuitions and new questions before taking visible form. More than a biographical reading, CRÁNEO reflects on the inner mechanisms of creation: that which has not yet found an image, that which is still taking shape, that which remains wrapped or, as in this case, that which has not been understood (yet).
Esmeralda Gómez Galera
Madrid, 2026
[1] Kundera, M. (1995). La lentitud [Slowness]. Barcelona: Tusquets Editores.