Museum of Roman Art, Mérida, 1986

From the vantage point of Spain’s visibility in the 1992 of the Olympic Games and Expo, and the 2004 of the economic and cultural boom, three generations of Spanish architects and three works by foreigners in Spain serve to test a taxonomy of the eye. The scientific objectivity of the eye of Dziga Vertov’s camera is superposed to the sports hall of Alejandro de la Sota: a look of trust in the future and in technology that is shared with Foster’s tower, and which finds its reverse in that mechanization of the organic suggested by the pupil-diaphragm of Max Ernst. The rational historicism of the Theater of Besançon by Ledoux is associated to Moneo’s museum: a look seduced by the past that can also lie in the historicist Corbusian quotes of Meier’s museum, and whose elegiac side is found in a pupil of Escher that evokes the mortality of memory. And the fugitive expressionism of the fake mirror of Magritte is linked to the cemetery of Miralles: a creative look that explores the fleeting present like Gehry’s Guggenheim, and for which it makes sense to propose the symbolic dark underside of the eye of Man Ray, with the paraffin tears that display the painful and unseizable nature of the time that slips away like water through the fingers...[+]