Casado Santapau is pleased to present HIPERASIA, the third solo exhibition at the gallery by Chilenian artist Patrick Hamilton (1974).

At the intersection of art, economics, cultural critique, and recent history, Patrick Hamilton brings us closer to issues such as the crisis of post-capitalism, which extends to unemployment produced by the advance of AI, the inequality gap, environmental collapse, and all the inevitable consequences brought about by the notion of neoliberal development that constructs the model of the global economy. In his work, Hamilton reformulates the language of geometric abstraction and minimalism to develop a sharp investigation into the formation and modes of operation of neoliberalism, a topic so visible in the first decades of this century. In the words of the theorist Nelly Richard, Hamilton “puts an archaeological memory to work”, which consists of collecting archival images and diverse materials in an attempt to understand the clash of forces that defines the present. While the core of his work addresses historical, social, and cultural processes that have taken place in his country, Chile, these issues are currently visible in societies across the entire planet.

In HIPERASIA, the artist attempts to create a portrait of his everyday experience with the Chinese bazaars and shops that abound in the city of Madrid, as a kind of museum of contemporary curiosities. Patrick Hamilton has spent years turning to them in search of material and formal solutions for his various works in sculpture, photography, and painting. From this experience arise the two bodies of work exhibited in the gallery. On the one hand, Abrasive Paintings, compositions made with sandpaper in red and black tones that pay tribute to Neo-Geo art and Op Art of the 1970s and 1980s. On the other hand, he presents the photographic series Equilibrios, consisting of precarious constructions made with tools, costume jewelry, amulets, and tourist postcards that he then photographs, in the key of trompe-l’œil, with his camera.

Hamilton has conceived HIPERASIA as a series of essays with concerns that point in different directions, whether physiological, ideological, or related to consumption, and which are presented from a perspective halfway between ethnography and anthropology, pointing to organic and symbolic processes in which questions of temporality, aesthetics, and cultural and social banalization underlie.