I write this text on one of the last afternoons of 2020, without a doubt one of the darkest years that our generation has lived through. I try to quantify the tears that have been shed for those who were lost along the way, for the life that should have been and was not, and for the longing of better times. Suddenly I feel overwhelmed by the universality of this pain, because it transcends time and space, it was already there before I was born and it beats inside each one of us.

 

Humanity has been engulfed in this same darkness many times before and it is our destiny to inhabit it and accept that it is part of life itself. "There can be no distance between life and death", said Sherry Kerlin while sitting among her paintings in her New York studio in a preparatory video call for this exhibition, "they are juxtaposed principles". Thus, it is in the most absolute darkness that the hopeful brilliance of light is also contained as an inseparable unit: the earliest brightness of dawn always occurs after the darkest moment of the night.

 

The Most Beautiful Night of Our Lives is a virtual meeting of six artists which, in its digital immateriality, seems ethereal, even utopian: Angela Lane (Berlin, Germany), Daniel M. Granitto (Lakewood, USA), Juan Carlos del Valle ( CDMX, Mexico), Lekha Singh (Dallas, USA), Michael Pemberton (Los Angeles, USA) and Sherry Kerlin (New York, USA). And even though they come from different geographies and have very particular plastic languages, they come together on the shared path of exploring the mystery that is life, joining in an intimate conversation that dilutes all distances. The exhibition is made up of twelve works that pay silent homage to the twelve months that have passed, each one full of life, of human history.

 

The title and the curatorial theme of this exhibition refer to Akira Kurosawa's film A Wonderful Sunday (1947), more specifically, it is a nod to its profoundly moving final sequence, in which the two main characters, who have lost everything but each other, listen to Schubert's Unfinished Symphony thanks only to the sheer power of their imagination and their love. "This is the kind of world in which you need dreams the most. You cannot live without them. It would be too painful", says young Masako, "all of you people, applaud. All of you young lovers, applaud for your dreams".

 

Art, like life itself, is relentless in its own will to exist and, even in the most adverse of circumstances, it is always a possible space for dreams to survive. Art teaches us about the force of imagination to materialize the impossible and here lies the innermost essence of creation. It is my wish that 2020 has been the most beautiful night of our lives.