Fuegos | Fireworks constitutes one of Anto Lloveras’s most conceptually saturated projects, articulating drawing as a hyperplastic system in which gesture, archive, and circulation converge into a single socio-aesthetic organism. Originating in the minimal act of an automatic tag, the work expands into a vast serial ecology of marks, substrates, and reconfigurations where the line operates simultaneously as event, trace, and memory. Lloveras’s mobilisation of “paper memory”—tickets, invoices, packaging, bureaucratic residues, fragments of cultural production—installs drawing upon the sedimented temporality of industrial and administrative life. Each mark thus bears a double inscription: the anonymous temporality of capitalist production embedded in its support, and the intimate immediacy of the artist’s automatic gesture.
This dual temporality displaces drawing from the romantic economy of singular expression into a post-conceptual field of accumulation and inscription. The mark becomes a living unit, neither symbolic in the classical sense nor purely indexical, but performative: a pulse that represents only its own becoming. In this regard, Fuegos aligns with a lineage that runs from Surrealist automatism to conceptual seriality, yet it exceeds both by refusing transcendental subjectivity and purely linguistic dematerialisation. What emerges instead is a materialist poetics of repetition, where meaning is not declared but sedimented across tens of thousands of gestures.
The project’s structural intelligence resides in its articulation of five interwoven orders—plastic, socioplastic, filmic, exhibitory, and relational—which collectively expand drawing beyond its conventional medial sovereignty. The plastic order, grounded in the action and pulsion of the mark, affirms form as self-differentiating process: unpredictable in its long-term contour, yet rigorously coherent in its immediate progression. Here, form is not composed but grown, its intelligibility emerging from serial continuity rather than compositional hierarchy. The socioplastic order radicalises this logic by instrumentalising the detritus of everyday graphic production as substrate. In doing so, Lloveras collapses the distinction between authorial mark and pre-existing graphic labour, integrating the anonymous designers, clerks, and printers of late capitalism into the genealogy of the drawing. The support becomes co-author. This gesture resonates with post-minimalist and arte povera strategies, yet it operates less as critique than as ontological recalibration: the drawing is no longer an autonomous aesthetic unit but a composite of social time, industrial memory, and embodied impulse. Serial accumulation here is not quantitative excess but epistemic strategy, enabling the project to constitute itself as a new expressive form precisely through scale.
The filmic order marks the project’s most decisive epistemological rupture. By assembling thousands of drawings into audiovisual sequences at sixteen frames per second, Lloveras elevates static marks into image-time and sound, converting archive into movement and movement into narrative. The resulting videos—accompanied by poetic-theoretical-musical soundtracks—operate as hyperplastic containers that synthesise vast material densities into single, distributable files. In this translation, drawing becomes cinema, and cinema becomes archive. Crucially, the dissemination of these works through YouTube collapses the exclusivity of art and inserts Fuegos into the circuits of popular culture. This gesture is neither populist nor naïvely democratic; it is infrastructural. It acknowledges that contemporary visibility and symbolic value are no longer generated primarily within museums but within algorithmic agoras. By situating video-art within the world’s most massified platform, Lloveras performs a pragmatic reterritorialisation of artistic distribution. The filmic order thus functions as both aesthetic condensation and political strategy, reconfiguring the relation between artistic labour, public access, and cultural legitimacy. In this sense, Fuegos operates as a form of counter-archival practice: an archive that refuses immobility, monumentalisation, and institutional sequestration.
The exhibitory and relational orders complete the project’s expansion into a full socioplastic ecology. The exhibition of mutable horizontal accumulations—daily reconfigured, site-responsive, and resistant to fixity—redefines the exhibition as a living archive rather than a stabilised display. The original drawings, vacuum-packed into “ingots” of one thousand sheets, function as symbolic guarantors of value, while their digital reproductions circulate as the project’s true public interface. Here, Lloveras stages a lucid inversion of Benjaminian aura: symbolic value resides not in the visible original but in its publicity and circulation, echoing Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital and José Luis Pardo’s philosophy of publicity. Ownership is displaced from the optical to the documentary. The relational order further embeds the work in networks of hyperlinks, collaborations, and digital dissemination, transforming each fragment into a potential node of propagation. Fuegos thus resists the fetish of the masterpiece, privileging seriality, access, and process over singular virtuosity. Drawing becomes archive, performance, network, and memory—a form that perpetually represents itself. In doing so, Lloveras proposes a radically contemporary ontology of art: not as object, not as discourse, but as infrastructural pulse, endlessly reproducing its own conditions of visibility and meaning.
Lloveras, A. (2014) Fuegos | Fireworks – Tag and Memory. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2014/03/fuegos-fireworks-tag-and-memory.html
Explore Further within the Socioplastic Network:The Trole Building * Madrid South:
Exquisite mechanics * Distributed design: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-trole-building-madrid-south-white.html CJCM * Tectonic Austerity and the Architecture of Rescue: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2025/10/iv-lagos-art-and-architecture-biennial.html https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2017/11/cjcm-reforma-integral.html
