TEXT BRAKKE GROND:

Love is in the air
Everywhere I look around
Love is in the air
Every sight and every sound

And I don’t know if I’m being foolish
Don’t know if I’m being wise
But it’s something that I must relieve in
And it’s there when I look in your eyes

Love is in the air

In the upcoming exhibition “As hard as it can get” Carlos Aires will present a new body of work. The show visually questions the impossibility to absorb any kind of reality that is not happening somewhere close around us, a reality that we only see on screens or in print. The confrontation of this impossibility with our daily life, here and now, is the central theme of the exhibition. We are part of a society of the spectacle. Images of disasters, advertisements, reality shows and soaps are all absorbed in the exact same way. It seems that only things captured in images are truly happening. “As though we’re looking at something and not being able to see it, as though it’s not there, as though it’s invisible”, explains a voice in the video ‘Cataracts’.
The pieces of Carlos Aires deal with the dark side of our daily melodrama: the finger that switches off the screen, on which you have just watched horrible images of a war, afterward rings the bell of a private nightclub.
What is hidden behind all this glossy entertainment, behind this colorful spectacle that keeps us staring at the screen without blinking? Nightclubs with go-go dancers, funfairs, daily news, chat rooms on the Internet, ... became the contemporary circus tents where we can keep watching and smiling, inertly. As Moloko sings “Have you ever smiled for too long? Until you are aching. Have you ever laughed until you cried? Until your heart is breaking.”