Dionis Escorsa. THE COSMIC BELL AND THE BREATHING LAKE

Entitled The cosmic bell and the breathing lake, RocioSantaCruz presents, for the first time at the gallery, a solo exhibition by artist Dionis Escorsa. 

Dionis Escorsa’s work reveals the artist’s sustained interest in exploring modes of visual representation and their relationship with the elements that condition the aesthetic experience. His practice combines traditional media—such as painting and drawing—with contemporary technological tools, generating a visual poetics in which matter and light play a fundamental role. Reflections, shadows, and atmospheres create immersive environments that appeal to both the viewer’s sensory perception and emotional memory. In this way, Escorsa dismantles conventional narrative structures and proposes active participation, where the audience is not a passive observer but a presence called upon to inhabit the symbolic space of the work. 

As a whole, The cosmic bell and the breathing lake offers a critical reinterpretation of landscape and family memory, not as closed archives, but as living territories that can be rewritten, intervened upon, and reinterpreted. Thus, from a perspective that intertwines the intimate with the historical, Dionis Escorsa proposes a reflection on memory, representation, and intergenerational transmission, where personal reference expands and achieves universal value.

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I spent my entire childhood under a painting of a bell tower hanging in my parents’ dining room. A few months ago, I asked them to let me take it so I could make its bells ring and turn it back into a clock. Now it even shows the weather in real time in Tavèrnoles, the small village near Vic where my grandfather painted it almost a century ago. 

The painting enriches the other pieces in the exhibition. The signal emitted by the original bell tower, already encrypted from the outset and altered by ambient noise, forms a series of variations and replicas that are merely attempts to decode the lost existence of an ancestor.

With Albert Merino, we applied the same methodology (3D video mapping connected in real time to a weather server and projected onto the painting) to the semi-submerged bell tower in Sau, neighbor and sister tower to the one in Tavèrnoles. The large oil paintings of  The breathing lake highlight a climatic component that is particularly sensitive today: the fluctuation of the water level, which we were able to project based on data from a server belonging to the Hydrographic Confederation.

The series of watercolors in The tallest flower begins with painting as perfect a copy as possible of the original bell tower, gradually altering it. Together, they form a landscape with a continuous horizon and sequential reading that fictionalizes a patriarchal genealogy and allows us to visualize the portrait of my father (which is both that of my grandfather and a self-portrait) ringing the seed bells inside the bell tower-flower.

Finally, in The house that coughs, the exercise in stylistic appropriation reaches its climax. Not only do I produce another clone copy of the original painting, but I also travel to Tavèrnoles and paint the bell tower from all four cardinal points. The process reveals to me that, due to restoration work, the church is now one floor lower than when my grandfather painted it, so that when I make my final corrections, I end up with eight images in which the church seems to breathe.

 Dionis Escorsa