2024

This year, AI is exploding. For the first time, since mankind used technology—a brush, a pencil, a stick, a pigment—to express itself, the technology has surpassed its creator. AI can mimic styles of artists dead and living, conjure words in a simulacrum of intelligence, speak in human voices.

The digtal images and the text we read are all the result of statistical manipulation, pure logos. Behind what we perceive as AI art and literature is an alien landscape of numbers. If we recognise it as familiar is it because we are predisposed to do so, like seeing a face in them moon; pareidolia?

An important question, for the year also sees writers striking to secure their creative rights and images conjured in moments displacing the illustrators whose data they ingested. It is an election year in which we cannot believe anything we see, hear, or read, on a screen.

It is worth asking: this new way of creating art … is it exciting? or is it illusory?

ART 2024

For 2024, we have collaborated with art advisor Thaïs Botinas to arrange a programme to resonate with our theme: illusion.

We invited Carles Taché to share his thoughts in an inaugural event, in a dialogue with Thaïs Botinas, moderated by Ignasi Rifé (coordinator of Elea).

Thereafter, throughout the summer, artists José María de Aurora & Yoyo Balagué, Xavier González Arnau, Jaume Roig & Jean Marie del Moral, and Manolo Sierra; artists who value the essential and real; offer us form and gesture, pigment and clay, uniquely physical, human creations that cannot be reproduced digitally, or experienced via a screen.

Programme 2024

8 June 2024

Carles Taché in discussion @ Secret Mill.

30 June 2024 - 14 July 2024

“Aether And Earth” - José María de Aurora & Yoyo Balagué. Gesture and form expressed through painting and sculpture inhabit the Mill together in a never before seen collaboration; a Zen informed alchemical wedding.

21 July 2024 - 4 August 2024

“Interregnes” - Xavier González Arnau. Vast Romantic paintings of the natural world given the space to be contemplated in the peace of the Mill.

8 August 2024 - 20 August 2024

“Lost Universal Common Ancestor” - Jaume Roig with Jean Marie del Moral. Jaume Roig takes us to the origins of life through sculpture, accompanied by unpublished photographs of the creative process in his studio, taken by the prestigious Moral photographer.

29 August 2024 - 15 September 2024

“S” - Manolo Sierra. Our resident in-house artist returns. The painter embraces a letter, and the concepts it generates, to bring to painting part of the history his experiences.