According to Guy Davenport in his book Objetos sobre una mesa, the last coherent thought Nietzsche had before losing his mind was that all history and all meaning are arbitrary—a fiction of our own making. The only certainty we could have was that every event might happen again and again. This vision of a cyclical fate, developed during his time in Turin, would later inspire the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico.

For the exhibition Sólo un poco de materia at Arróniz Gallery, Emanuel Tovar draws from Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, which highlight the emptiness of life and the relevance of death. He finds a certain parallel between these fabricated scenes and the accidental compositions of objects he encounters in workshops. In this way, the eerie imagery—where we recognize familiar objects that nonetheless seem to exist in an unreal plane, suspended in time—merges with materials, tools, or garments taken from real-world settings.

Tovar proposes an alternative integration between reality and fiction, tragedy and misery, the material and the intangible, Fine Art and monotonous everyday life.

Musical instruments, fruits, insects, books, stones, gloves, and other items are used—or in some cases molded and replicated—to create new scenarios where ordinary actions, worldly pleasures, and philosophical inquiries come into play. Through these objects, he reflects on movement, friction, and time as inescapable natural sculptors—potent, erosive forces acting upon matter. He uncovers narratives embedded in simple things, revealing traces of human existence.