Even Minerals Melt, the most recent work by Paul Ekaitz for Galerie Invaliden 1, once again places us on the 'other side'. It is a position that we similarly occupy with painting, theater or cinema - to name just a few methods, though these might seem antagonistic from a technological point of view - in order to serve as an open 'window' for display.

Strictly speaking, this work by Paul Ekaitz is neither painting nor film nor theater, but its specific intervention into the space of the gallery and the nature of the elements that compose it brings us back to the aforementioned methods rather than to what many would define as an installation. In the search for further parallelisms, the viewer is confronted with a scene that is already heralded by the large curtain extending from the ceiling to the floor upon crossing the threshold ... of the gallery.

This represents a kind of opaque boundary as precedes the screening of a film or a theater performance. Once inside, the artist is more a kind of artistic director of a play, which nevertheless - and herein lies the uniqueness of this work - only aims to present a process. Surely the viewer will find no lack of cultural references with which to classify the scene in front of him. Once again, we return to cinema to interpret the black monolith from which the crystal figure carved in ice emerges (2001: A Space Odyssey); or to Romanticist literature for the magical and symbolic representation of the mountain in the background of the arrangement. Yet the truth is that this scene and its possible poetic allusions is less an end in itself per se, but rather the result of a working process and even more the starting point of an explicit development.

For several days before the public opening of the project, the gallery will become a production site and the artist will move his studio and all the necessary materials with which to lend form to his vision. The crystal made of ice in the center of the scene serves as a key symbolic element, but also as a chronometer of a precise temporal dimension. In fact, before it can melt, the artist will take a single photograph, which will later be exhibited in the narrow space in front of the curtain, thus revealing an otherwise well kept secret. The work of Paul Ekaitz uses the aid of production processes to question the status of an art work and the supposed suitability of the means with which it is represented. But more importantly, it poses questions as to our position and our responsibility as viewers in the face of new forms of perception and the temporality of artistic work.

Juan de Nieves. Translated from German by Alexander Paulick-Thiel