El centauro.
La reproducción no existe.
Diferencia y repetición como una de las bellas artes.
An exhibition curated by Pedro G. Romero30.MAY.2026 — 18.JULY.2026
Reproduction does not exist.
Difference and Repetition as One of the Fine Arts.
The idea behind La Oficina’s exhibition was to bring the excellence of its second season — featuring Regina Silveira, Isaías Griñolo, Carla Filipe, Bárbara Fonte, Edgar Calel, María García Ruiz and Voluspa Jarpa — to a close through an exhibition reflecting on the recurring concerns that run across all of these practices. Indeed, any one of these artists could easily have been part of this group exhibition. The invitation emerged equally from theory and from play, and this is precisely where El centauro comes from.
Repetition, reproduction and the graphic turn were among the recurring concerns of the season — shared insistences among a diverse group of artists, all of which might be understood as attempts to keep alive the indistinction between the work of art and the document. Hence the obvious choice to feature Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, an undisputed classic on the subject, a text that survives the most clichéd interpretations and the most facile journalism—in short, an author whom I, the writer of this piece, am constantly revisiting. Ada and Adriana’s phone call caught me in the midst of reading two such works simultaneously: Fredric Jameson’s The Benjamin Files, a general overview deeply embedded within the materialist machinery, and Federico Rodríguez’s Sagitario infinito, Walter Benjamin, una astrología racional [Infinite Sagittarius: Walter Benjamin, a Rational Astrology] —obviously, the dwarf hidden within that very same materialist machine of playing chess. It is in this second book that The Centaur appears, a brief piece by the young Benjamin that already conceals many of the persistent concerns of his thought, many of the recurring themes in his work, many of the relationships that will be repeated in his writings. Through this lens, we perceive a dual nature laid bare without contradiction: animal and human, work of art and document—impossible to reconcile, yet held together simultaneously.
All this was laid out on the table when I suddenly realized that underneath it all lay a powerful resonance with an exhibition in which I myself had participated, alongside Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Ignasi Aballí, Nestor Sanmiguel and Juan Luis Moraza, a few years ago—an exhibition curated by Beatriz Herráez under the title I Am the End of Reproduction, whose seemingly light-hearted scope held deep significance for me. That double use of the word ‘end’—as both a purpose and a terminus, for example— deepened my own inquiry into what reproduction actually is. I’m sure my first subtitle, Reproduction does not exist, stems from that, but also from another essay I read this season, El dispositivo con existe [The Apparatus Does Not Exist], by María Tortajada and François Albera, which has allowed me to reflect anew on what the medium signifies and what constitutes the material space of the imagination, in a truly remarkable way. I won’t discuss Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition at all, as this second subtitle was intended to be explicit, without ambiguity, and because Andrea Soto Calderón brilliantly discusses it in Besieged by Possibility, a text that follows my presentation.
So, essentially, yes, this, then, is the conceptual framework — or perhaps the game — and what follows is what ultimately shapes the exhibition, propelling its meanings and scope far beyond my own obsessions as a compulsive reader, so to speak. A game that has been thrilling and moving, and for which I wish to explicitly thank the thirteen artists who will be present in the structure and form of this exhibition for their engagement and collaboration. Especially the maestros – a word that carries resonance for me since it combines the sparkling usage found in flamenco slang along with the depth and scope of its more republican expression, that of the heroic republican schoolteacher, who remains a guiding light for me in the figure of Juan de Mairena—who have chosen to join in the exhibition’s endeavour: artists, illustrators and poets to whom I return again and again. Francisco Ferrer Lerín, whose books I seem to own in more duplicate copies than those of any other writer, for the simple reason that the joy of spotting them in second-hand bookshops and markets always clouds my judgement and leads me to believe I haven’t read them. It is true that Ferrer Lerín helps us to illustrate the book’s production system, which is key to the poetics of this exhibition, but the fact is that his writing embodies much of that insistence we have been highlighting; consider, for example, his novels, Die Rabe, P.A.M., Níquel, Nora Peb and Familias como la mía, all different and yet all the same. Andrés Rábago, El Roto, surely the artist who has influenced me the most, given that every day I wake up looking for the cartoon he has left printed on the pages of El País. The scope of his work always makes me think of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter: evidence on the table, clear and precise, that nobody sees. Anyway, how is it possible that museums don’t give more prominence to El Roto’s drawings when they should form a sort of visual chronicle of our time? Then there is Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, the third of these masters—not just in terms of age, though that too. Valcárcel Medina is, without a doubt, a prime example in this exhibition, given that his concerns and ours are the same, only he has done so without fuss or grand gestures. From a prodigious singularity, he has also managed to evade all the taxonomic categories that pursue him — minimalist, conceptual, performative. Valcárcel Medina’s works have eluded, and continue to elude, the constraints and clichés of reproduction; in his work, that which is always the same is, by definition, always different.
Anyway, if I may, I won’t dwell on the large group of artists who are with us here and who, as my own works in the exhibition quite clearly show, emerge largely from the interplay of traces, marks and references from these three masters, much like the old flamenco singers. Reproduction, as Baruch Spinoza once said, requires a large group, a multitude. Because the NEG (Nova Escultura Galega) are already four—Misha Bies Golas, Jorge Varela, Alejandra Pombo Su and Diego Vites. But who would say that Julio Jara is a single artist? The same can be said of the work presented by Mauro Cerqueira, which calls upon Babi Badalov as a sort of double. Joy Charpentier could just as well be part of this constellation. The same goes for Oier Etxeberria, on this side of the border. Like Victor Jaenada and Efrén Álvarez, who come to mind paired together on Barcelona nights. A similar dialectic to that played out by Erik Beltrán and Juan Pablo Macias on behalf of a Mexico that is right here in Spain. In short, I assure you that my humble words do not do justice to, nor even begin to sketch out, the intensity hidden within this exhibition. Some might think this is just about photocopies, but, well, after all, DNA strands also make photocopies of themselves. There is an anonymous, sophisticated graffiti artist in Seville who never ceases to amaze me: ‘Analogy! Repetition does not exist,’ he wrote, in a strangely analyrical gesture, on the desolate Muro de los Navarros.
Besieged by possibility
por Andrea Soto Calderón
disparātus, disparāre, parāre: to scatter in divergent directions,
to arrange, to shoot, to draw a bow, to tense a bowstring;
parere: to give birth, to bear, to engender.
On the 15th of July 1921, Walter Benjamin wrote a short note titled “Der Centaur”. Quoting Hölderlin, he states that the centaur belongs to a time when creation was brought forth through the spirit of water. Moisture was life. Water wandering aimlessly, a directionless violence that would later become a stream. Water that is also stagnation and swell. The centaur, half-animal, half-human, does not represent the union of two natures, but rather the impossibility of that union. The centaur emerges precisely where continuity fails. It emerges in the tense space of a shattered possibility, one that rebels against its inheritance and produces a variation that recognises no model.
The exhibition The Centaur. Reproduction Does Not Exist. Difference and Repetition as One of the Fine Arts, curated by Pedro G Romero at La Oficina, straddles the line between artwork and document, featuring photocopies, irregular mosaics, transits, mail-art-style copies, series, geometric gap voids that can never be grasped in a single glance, newspapers, photographs, fragments and repetitions. Sets of ceramics, suspended images in which monsters and fantastical animals loom, handwritten books, sweet wrappers, phrases repeated up to a thousand times, organisational charts, paintings, colouring books, printing plates where what is reproduced is not the form but difference itself. The centaur appears as a figure of incongruity. Structural contradiction. It belongs to no lineage, no discipline, no stable identity. It is a figure in transit, made of remnants and borrowings. If anything can be called a ‘work’ here, it is that movement. A movement without origin or destination, traversing bodies, images, texts, spaces, where reproduction unravels and difference is produced.
Copying has historically been devalued as it threatened the monopoly on meaning. Folklore has always known this. There is no original in a song, in a procession, in a rallying cry sung in the streets. There is, instead, an active memory that is rewritten in every body. Everything that has been called a copy—folklore, craftsmanship, popular practices, minor images, rituals, anonymous actions—has been expelled from the realm of the artwork to preserve the fiction of origin. This is the materialist operation that interested Benjamin: that the quality which distinguishes the art-thing from other things is conditioned not only by difference but also by repetition, the variable aspect of time, of history, in order to approach the phantom, the unknown of what cannot be seen or known.
Repetition only occurs when something changes in what is repeated, when shocks tighten and are propelled forward, giving moments a different weight. To reproduce is to insist without identity, to return without return. A continuity that is not teleological, as in Val del Omar’s sin fin [no end], which is not merely that the film never ends. It is precisely in these mechanisms, in their automatisms, in their cracks, in their holes, in the accidental, in their encounters, in their flaws, where something escapes. Yes, some meaning, other voices, other fragments from the wreck. When repetition becomes a kind of nonsense.
Nonsense distends meaning, dilates it. In Goya’s Follies (Disparates) series, nonsense becomes the only affirmation of reality in art. It is art’s most formidable tension, its deepest moment. Jorge de Oteiza said that the aesthetic equivalence of nonsense in Spanish folklore is emphatically manifested in cante jondo: “In Cante Jondo, the voice breaks and the song defies the apparent order it knows. It is against one thing and against another”. For this reason it is also called false music, a form of musical folly. We could say that repetition partakes of folly; it mocks unity: “through nonsense, popular intuition acquires the difficult abstract matter of its enduring language”.
Unlike what is commonly believed, identities do not pre-exist; they are produced by a profound interplay between difference and repetition. Repetition has been regarded negatively in the creative process, but even in the most mechanical, most stereotypical repetitions—both within and outside of us—small differences, variations, and modifications continue to exist. Not only because of the evidence that in every repetition there is difference, but also because there is no model. "In this case, the most exact, the most strict repetition has as its correlate the maximum of difference” . Thus, when we say that two things resemble each other like two peas in a pod, there is a difference in nature between repetition and resemblance. “Repetition as a conduct and as a point of view concerns non-exchangeable and non-substitutable singularities”. In Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze argues that “reflections, echoes, doubles and souls do not belong to the domain of resemblance or equivalence; and it is no more possible to exchange one's soul than it is to substitute real twins for one another”. To repeat is to enter into a relationship with something unique and singular, but not in order to establish an equivalence. A reappearance with all its differences, coming into contact with a more secret, deeper vibration within the singularity that animates it. It is not a matter of adding but of elevating its power. Just as the heart does, “the amorous organ of repetition”. Perhaps that is why, "if repetition is possible, it is due to miracle rather than to law”.
This singularity that defies the law by embracing repetition is, from every point of view, a transgression, because it calls the law into question. “There is a force common to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Each, in their own way, makes repetition not only a power peculiar to language and thought, a higher pathos and pathology, but also the fundamental category of a philosophy of the future”. Repetition stands in opposition to all forms of generality, but repetition must be enacted; it is a matter of inventing rotations, turns, gravitations, dances, or leaps. “The manner in which sensation and perception along with need and heredity, learning and instinct, intelligence and memory - participate in repetition is measured in each case by the combination of forms of repetition, by the levels on which these combinations take place, by the relationships operating between these levels and by the interference of active syntheses with passive syntheses”.
In La otra mitad de Dios: Una indagación sobre el imaginario humano [The Other Half of God: An Inquiry into the Human Imagination] (2021), Ginevra Bompiani revisits the biblical account of Lot’s story to reflect on the impulse of destruction as an archetype of creation. The destructive impulse seeks to create space, for it is within an interval that transformation occurs. “All destructive angels make room”. However, she proposes that there is another type of creation, one that characterizes children’s play: repetition. Children, as Walter Benjamin says, create from the beginning; they repeat from the beginning as a new act. “The child creates by repeating”. In Greek myths, repetition is a curse, but “learning makes use of repetition, betraying it little by little”. There is a suffocating repetition from which there is no escape, one that duplicates itself, yet this repetition is the opposite of that of the child, of that ‘one more time’ which is repeated so that the game and the gesture do not disappear. There is a form of repetition that contains another possibility, the repetition found in the gallop, the pirouette of repetition, like the galloping rhythm of those gathered there. “In every turn lies the memory of the preceding turn and of its forgetting”. Bompiani attributes this conception to a feminine creativity. Paradoxically, this exhibition primarily features men, which likely points to a different way of doing things and, at the same time, reveals how men must re-examine their founding myths.
It is necessary to work with things here and there. Suddenly, a whole series of images is reproduced. In a sense, an image is an image only if it evokes other images, if it triggers and unfolds meaning, other associations, analogies, times, rhythms and, with them, differences. Naturally, reproduction and repetition are not exactly the same thing. As I was saying, there is only repetition when something changes in what is repeated. The rest—mechanical reiteration, seamless redundancy—is nothing more than the illusion of a timeless continuity.
The copy has historically been devalued because it challenges the authority of the original; because it shows that meaning is not guaranteed by a single point of departure, but can arise anywhere, at any time. According to Ticio Escobar, we can say that, in a certain sense, it is art's task to prevent the restriction of sensory and conceptual understanding, to halt the referentialist notion of meaning that seeks to confine something within its own identity. In a way, to make a difference is to empty meaning of its fixed significations and not surrender to the logic of facts. As Lyotard would have said, art must leave open the field of words, lines, colours and values so that a truth may emerge there. That sensitive work requires suspending our attention to what makes an impression in order to embrace the possibility that besieges us. To sustain what is unknown and respect that opacity, to surround it, to inhabit the experience of the formless so that it may begin to insist, to insinuate itself, to be felt. To allow oneself to be taken over by that which cannot be put into words. To embrace all strategies of detour, to let there be an adventure in between, so as not to think directly about what we are supposed to think.
An inventive process entails entering into relation with something raw and unresolved within a given milieu; however, it requires being open to it, exploring different possibilities and, at other times, remaining still to listen to what the moment demands so that the situation can take shape. We need to exercise our intuition, which can help generate further tendencies towards growth, because contrary to the long tradition of Western thought that has disparaged intuition, imagination opens up on the basis of intuition. This allows us to detect shifts, modulations and gestures that may elude the perceptual framework through which we apprehend the world. It allows us to approach that which has not yet been named, that which is in the process of taking shape. Intuition, thus, is not the opposite of rigorous thought, but a condition for thinking rigorously about something that has not yet come into being. Of course, intuition is not an individual or internal matter. On the contrary, it is a form of openness to the world, a way of entering into a relationship with it. The majority of our most fundamental decisions are not guided by a calculation of causes and effects, but by a complex perception of circumstances, emotions, atmospheres and gestures. Of course, intuition alone is not enough to generate other forms of experience; it is necessary to establish the material conditions of possibility for something to take shape. Intuition alters and produces the scope of what is possible. In this sense, we can speak of a logic of intensities, because organisation implies that imaginative situations emerge as duration, movement and immensity. But that possibility must be elaborated so as not to exhaust the full reality of that local activity which is the image.
Thus, here, exhibiting is not about displaying something, but about setting in motion a system of subtractions, withdrawals and appearances that disrupt the established order of what is presented to us. That is why there is a resistance to the object, to a single object. To its stability, to its promise of permanence, to its place within an exhausted genealogy. There is no model to return to, nor any origin to guarantee. A kind of flowering grows, defying all rooting and all order of necessity. There is a work in motion, a practice. Something that takes shape through repetition, through contact, through friction, like the contact that sets fire ablaze.
This has decisive consequences at a time, such as the present one, when so-called ‘generative’ technologies seem to have displaced the paradigm of reproduction. But what is a difference without repetition? Can there be variation without memory? A shift without persistence? Perhaps the issue is not to set the generative against the reproductive, but to conceive reproduction as a complex form of generation. The new not as an absolute rupture, but as an intensive variation. As a difference that differentiates itself. And it is there, in that complexity, that this exhibition finds its ground. To create is an act of responsibility towards the present. Creating images, words, sounds, and bodies that are yet to be invented.
To repeat, to insist, to reproduce is to force open the door of that which stands in the way of another birth.
To repeat. To insist. To vary.
To enter, once again, through the very place from which we had departed.