LUCE writes the city on the streetlights

Nine street lamps run in a curved line through the exhibition hall of La Fabra Centre d'Art Contemporani. They do not illuminate, but they evoke an absent city, reconstructed within the institutional space through one of its most everyday elements. On this structure, LUCE pierces phrases, statements and thoughts that appear as fragmentary writing and that refer to the multiple ways in which citizens leave traces on public space. This is how De cua d'ull takes shape, the site-specific installation with which LUCE inaugurates the new season of the art centre.

Freed from their usual use, streetlights become supports for a writing reminiscent of the posters that pile up on the streets of any city. Announcements for cleaning, moving or small services, handwritten or photocopied papers and strips of contact numbers form an ephemeral landscape that changes over time. What tends to go unnoticed in urban space becomes here an artistic material and an object of contemplation.

LUCE does not literally reproduce the landscape of advertisements stuck to street furniture, but extracts its logic and transfers it to an installation that moves between sculpture, writing and the memory of the city. The streetlights cease to be simply functional elements to become reading surfaces, while the words perforated on the metal evoke a kind of silent graffiti.

The city is LUCE's space for exploration, learning and creation. His practice is rooted in urban art and graffiti, and it is in this territory where his interest in writing appears, a presence that runs through much of his work. The street thus becomes a place of action and collection, a space where experiences, words and images are transformed into artistic material. Drawing and writing act as ways of distilling this urban experience.

In De cua d'ull , this look at the city focuses on those elements that we often only perceive peripherally. Streetlights are part of the landscape to the point that we stop seeing them; also the sticky notes, improvised messages and advertisements that colonize walls and street furniture tend to disappear under the everyday gaze. LUCE rescues these marginal signs and places them at the center of the exhibition experience, forcing the viewer to modify their usual way of looking.

The installation is also part of Interlude #2, the public program cycle of La Fabra Centre d'Art Contemporani that proposes to blur the boundaries between exhibition and public program. In this edition, the word occupies the center of reflection and is explored from different disciplines and practices, including performance, writing and sound. LUCE's proposal expands this territory from the spatial and visual experience, placing language in an intermediate space between the artistic object and the trace of everyday life.

The precariousness of urban advertisements is also part of the poetics of the piece. The posters offering services, with their strips of contact numbers that wave in the wind and that the rain eventually erases, constitute a form of communication destined to disappear. LUCE recovers this fragility and turns it into a reflection on memory, communication and the marks we leave in the spaces we share.

The title itself, De cua d'ull , points towards this desire to look at what is usually left on the sidelines. The artist works with the signs that populate the city without demanding specific attention and moves them inside the art center, where they acquire another temporality and a new capacity for significance.

The proposal, which can be visited until January 10, 2027, thus opens the new season of La Fabra Centre d'Art Contemporani with an installation that questions the boundaries between street and institution, between art and everyday life, and between what we decide to look at and everything that, despite being a constant part of our landscape, we only manage to perceive out of the corner of our eye.

LIGHT

Out of the corner of your eye, 2026

9 street lamps engraved with the following phrases:

The same gesture during the day, the same gesture at night. A spray in many places. Painting and landscapes. It rings and I think it was you. it was you

Safe under the rain, The wet land.

The insistence with which to appear.

The spontaneous path created by walking. illuminated Your hand projected on the wall, full moon.

Everything that happens between one and the other. both ways Between roads, and a red aerosol to follow. The remaining column burned when touched.