There is an aesthetic reflection on time in the work of Damián Alquichire; this is quite evident. But it shouldn't be forgotten that time is not a neutral substance, whether it flaunts its most graceful and playful form in music or dance or whether time—with all its eternities— fits perfectly on a cheap pocket watch. In conscious beings, time is and always will be a trace, a mark, a memory, since present moments are never completely erased but rather overlap each other until they create the sensation of movement, continuity, and consciousness. Only in an eternal universe, like in Heraclitus's Greece, could time be a static arrow floating in space, since the world was thought of as a great eternal cycle called to repeat itself over and over again. In our times, in our nihilistic times, that static arrow remembers its edge and its target and becomes an intolerable and fatal question about the future. Our time is not a geometric succession of spheres or triangles; our time has jaws and hunger.

Alquichire meditates abut time and, in particular, about our time—the time of the gods that never returned, of the yawning of the Anthropocene, of the dry wound of a dying world. Perhaps that is why when his drawings are static, they portray dead or nearly dead bodies, and when they come to life through animation, they seem driven by the anguish of not knowing where they are heading within the succession of moments, failures, and blots that creates our lives, that creates time itself.

Carlos Ulloa Rivero.