Bare feet should not touch the ground at any time. The vulnerable body of the creator, sick with AIDS (stigmatized then by the majority), was transported from one point to another in the city - first in San Sebastián, then in Madrid -, moving from the arms of a couple to the arms of another . As in the verse of Antigone, that creature no longer belonged to "the realm of the living nor that of the dead . " He said that the sick were obliged to "continue in the world without touching the world, keep walking without touching the earth." They were the lead years of AIDS , those in which ignorance and merciless hatred fueled the suffering of the sick, forced to die in the shadows. The performance Carrying (1992) of Pepe Espaliú (artistic name of José González Espaliú -Córdoba, October 26, 1955-) rescued the hidden body, placed it in the center of the polis, turned into the scene of a passion, in its etymological and transcendent sense; because that had the profile of a walking Pieta , detonating the astonishment of being in the middle of the street with the nomadic and living sculpture of an eccehomo . Men and women carrying, caring, coping - all that is admitted by the English gerund that gives it a title - a body reeked for other people.

The unattainable impact of that action, linked to the dance of the High Risk Group, of Anna Halprin, of Tracy Rhoades or of the activities of the Act-Up , illuminates as much as it eclipses the understanding of her work. Whether in performance , in sculpture, on canvas or in verse, the universe of Espaliú was always endowed with a determined theatricality. After passing through the School of Fine Arts in Seville, he settled in Barcelona in the early 70s. The county city was then a shared fever, a nursery of conceptual art, a desire for modernity. There the Cordoba finds the perfect forge for the hot metal of his obsessions. Lacan, Barthes and Genet spur their imagination. Now, his great teachers were the mystics, especially Saint John of the Cross and Rumí, from whom he learned that life was a detachment, an abandonment of all authority to "be reborn in Love . "

Espaliú's work - displayed in a frenzy of just seven years, between 1986 and 1993 - orbits in the same constellation as those of Louise Bourgeois, Joan Brossa, Gina Pane, Joan Ponç or Robert Mapplethorpe. It is made up of cages that never close, carriages and rusty palanquins, shells, leather masks, iron crutches, all that untidy matter that was close to the body still alive and that testifies now of its passions. Traditional crafts such as the saddlery or the hardware store are placed at the service of their obsessions and ghosts: the absence of the beloved, the persecution, the memory of the mother (deceased when he was 13 years old), the wish without a bridle (fetishism or sadomasochism) . Understand that there is no transcendent light that does not come from the darkness or that goes to it, assumes that the body is a fragile and transitory gift; hence his desire for absoluteness, his will for transcendence.

Espaliú does not stop working despite the progress of the disease. Beyond Carrying , he delivers new memorable actions, such as El nido , recorded in Holland in 1993, the year of his death. From a platform perched on a tree, as a giant nest, the artist strips his clothes until he is naked.

He returned to his native Córdoba to die. Espaliú delivered the body on November 2, 1993 . Few artists achieved such a perfect synthesis between the poetic and the political, without ever falling into the pamphleteer. In his work there is no defeat, but assumption, the thunderous silence of a body that sought joy, dignity and comfort.

No one wrote better about Pepe Espaliú than Espaliú himself. On December 1, 1992, he published Portrait of the Evicted Artist , emblem of his honesty and courage. In his paragraphs he denounces the persecution and exclusion he suffered as a homosexual, and announces that he is seriously ill with AIDS. Its reading, in these reactionary times, is chilling, but, above all, the article is a cry of life. Thus he concludes: "AIDS has radically forced me to be there. It has precipitated me into its being as a pure emergency. I thank AIDS for this unthinkable return to the surface, placing myself for the first time in an action in terms of Reality. Perhaps this time, and it is indifferent to me if it is the last one, my work as an artist has a full meaning, an absolute union with an existential limit that I always surrounded without knowing him at all, dancing with him without ever hugging him. it's the true dimension of that limit. Today I stopped imagining it. Today I am that limit. "

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