La tiranía de Cronos

With a selection of more than fifty works, including tapestries, paintings, sculptures, photographs and clocks, the exhibition La tiranía de Cronos is an inquiry into the idea of time and its representation, an issue that has played a key role in artistic creation.

The idea of an alternative time can be found at the base of some art processes, also included in this exhibition, that propose temporal models linked to the knowledge of nature; that practice the culture of deceleration or slow movement; or that directly question the widespread principle that time is gold and, therefore, cannot be lost. They are artists who conceive and experience time from more liberating positions or who question its regulation imposed by the consumer society.

The exhibition is divided into three chapters, the first of which, No tengo tiempo, articulates a reflection on the deep-rooted contemporary malaise of why time no longer belongs to us. It takes its title, I have no time, from a work by Croatian artist Mladen Stilinović in which the phrase is stubbornly repeated. That gesture functions as a prologue to the artists’ proposals, eminently conceptual in nature, on the Western notion of time and its role in capitalist society, which would not have been possible as we know it without the clock, a machine capable of measuring time accurately and exchanging it for merchandise. Work as a source of alienation, the labor precariousness of the new creative classes, the dissolution of the boundaries between work and life, or the relationship between time and money are some of the issues addressed by the pieces in this section.

The second chapter of the exhibition, Retratos al hilo del tiempo, opens with a large 17th-century tapestry entitled Triumph of Love and Eternity over Time, featuring the mythological figure of Chronos, and presents a parallel account of the role of the official portrait in the Bank of Spain and its collection of clocks, in a selection that runs from the 18th century to the 20th century. The watch has been a common object in the portraits of great dignitaries and monarchs, loaded with symbolism, as reflected in the paintings by Francisco de Goya in the exhibition or, in an interesting twist of history, in the two latest additions to the Bank’s gallery of effigies: the portraits of the current King and Queen of Spain and the former governor of the Bank of Spain, signed by Annie Leibovitz. Both works continue the tradition, begun in 1784, of fixing the memory of the institution by commissioning images of the governors and heads of state of each historical moment, although for the first time these have been made thanks to the photographic medium.

The third and last section of the exhibition, Un tiempo sin reloj, is the one that most clearly responds to the conception of a linear, measurable and predictable time that is at the base of contemporary productive logic. The artists seek to alter the principles that have governed time in the West and the consequences of the imposition of a single time, the time of the clock.

Curator, Yolanda Romero.

Artists: Yto Barrada, Charles Chaplin,  / Manuel Chavajay, Victoria Civera, Pietro Melchiorre Ferrarrari, Francisco de Goya, José Gutiérrez de la Vega, Candida Höfer, Ibghy & Lemmens, Manolo Laguillo, Annie Leibovitz, Jan Leyniers, Chema Madoz,  Juan Luis Moraza, Javier Nuñez Gasco, Antonio Pichillá, Ángel Poyón, Isabel Quintanilla, Raqs Media Collective, Inmaculada Salinas, Mladen Stilinovich, Isidoro Valcárcel,  Pieter Vermeersch.