A hand moves, fumbles. The hand finds a small doorknob which it turns and pushes. As the hand enters the newly opened space, it searches and rummages. A hand that rises through the shadows with the intention of opening up a space.

What do we choose to keep in our desk drawer? Underneath our bed? At the edge of the nightstand? Behind the books of that bookshelf we inherited? Can you imagine a house without a hiding place? A space in which absolutely everything lays exposed, where an old teddy is found strewn across the hallway; our first letter by the bathroom sink; the remnants of some item of clothing on the kitchen counter, or broken pencils hanging from the coat rack at the entrance. All these things we keep because they are something are, in the case of Emmanuel Lafont (Buenos Aires, 1980), tangible forms of his artistic creation: watercolours, sketches, drawings, bits of graphite…

The work of Lafont pushes us to rethink what we see when we read and what we read when we see. The Argentinian artist puts us in front of our own history, that which happens to us day after day, like little daily fictions. Yet in the new exhibition presented by Yusto/Giner, Lafont steps forward subtly to put us in front of his own story. “Life in drawers” is a tip toe approach to the secrets of the artist, but more specifically to an exact secret: in that moment, almost imperceptible, where the idea initiates a brush stroke. These allegorical transitions are what Lafont has wanted to show us, to bring out, so that we remember the silence that inhabits the places where we keep our things. In these drawers, the object is the image: they return from the murmurs guarded by those hiding places; from the corridors, the bathroom faucet, the kitchen, or the coat rack. There arise the small remains that are traces here. Again, the image.

One of those romantic theorists who saw in what remains the place from which to build what is to come, wrote that only ruins will return questions. Lafont’s proposal interrogates a blank hall. Maybe some of these questions are the same that the artist himself would write in the drawers of his old homes. We cannot read them, but Lafont has allowed our hand to search and rummage. Will a space open or will we have to imagine it? Turn the doorknob.