«Sous les pavés, la mer» («under the cobblestones, the sea»), read a famous graffiti of May '68. With Subbombs we can see, however, that under the images, hidden but persistent, there are other images, fragments of another reason for things. Our society today may no longer easily give rise to naive utopia. On the other hand, the satisfactory comfort or the small urgencies of our daily life make us lower our guard about the sibylline construction of the collective stories led by perverse interests, about how they narcotize or manipulate us. There is an image under the image and it is particularly significant.

Quim Tarrida explains that while watching videos about the civic responses to the war in Iraq, his computer crashed and a series of incomprehensible and chaotic images appeared on the screen. It is these random appearances arising from a computer collapse that underlies Subbombs. These "corrupt images", as he lucidly calls them, are the result of a system failure, of a saturation of information, very close to the concepts of accident or catastrophe as Paul Virilio has defined them: as a consequence of our hyper-technological system and of domination by speed.

Something in this pixelated mosaic reminds us of the simplicity of the first war-based video games (Space invaders and other star battles), where we can all decode the bombings despite being schematized to the fullest. Its beauty is, like the aestheticization of politics that Walter Benjamin denounced, sinister. There is something disturbing in the formalist beauty (the one that moves between the experimental transcendentalism of abstraction and the decorative superficiality) that is observed in the series Subbombs. Its hypnotic appeal and slightly indifferent towards the spectator, esoteric, fails to camouflage the threatening figurative resonances. It goes from being a hidden image to being revealing and warns us about the deception, as well as about the cynicism of the collateral damage euphemism.

Subbombs is a piece that may seem eccentric within the production of Quim Tarrida, often performed in a lucid imaginary pop. The occasion to exhibit it in the Espai Guinovart gives it a special relevance: it links with the concern of Josep Guinovart for human conflicts and suffering, as well as with the memory of the bombings of Agramunt during the Civil War (still present, underground but inescapable , in the shelter below the church of Santa María). The accident, the sudden error, is the lightning-flash that, in the present, brings back the consciousness of a violence that time does not erase.

Àlex Mitrani