Sweet dreams are made of this

All the work by Carlos Aires is related to this personal saying “what touches you”. It can be “what touches you” figuratively, the cultural, inherited and rooted in our inner self; “what touches you” from the perspective of looking and/or being looked at; or “what touches you” physically, a brush, something that grabs you or force you corporeally. Breaking with his habitual artistic-videographic tour based on the relationship with the stare as a narrative/discursive form by the experience of touch in a much more obvious way, almost pornographic (as Roland Barthes wrote in “L’Obvie et l’Obtus”. As if the artist added both senses creating a single unit which defines them, or at least, defines his way of understanding and being in the world.

“Sweet dreams are made of this” is a single-channel stylish wrought HD film. The title is the same as that of the famous song “Eurythmics” (1983), it is not by chance that a version serves as the background music for two policemen wearing their anti-riot uniforms and dancing closely. The meticulousness of the film, the baroque location of Madrid’s Cerralbo Museum , the endless movement of the camera, characters and narrative, the careful choreography (a tango, not in vain), a dance full of homoerotic content since it traces its origins to the marginal harbour of Buenos Aires, where homosexuals danced to it (not so well-known fact); all these elements resignify a sensuality which embroiders or tattoes the piece in our gaze, every gesture, every brush explode right in our memory as well as remind us, ipso facto, of the media images or the recent beatings by security forces who abuse their power under the same uniform these dancers wear here as a costume, in the midst of “Ley Mordaza” (Gag Rule).