The year 2023 marks a decisive turning point in the fifteen-year trajectory of LAPIEZA. After the fertile retreat of the Recreo epoch (2020–2022)—those slow, almost vegetal years in rural Ávila where the archive learned to breathe—the project re-emerges into public space with renewed energy and a sharper sense of its own operational logic. The Biennials Epoch (2023–2024) is not a simple return to the pre-pandemic nomadic intensity. It is a more mature, more self-aware phase: LAPIEZA no longer presents itself as a traveling exhibition or a series of residencies. It operates instead as a post-institutional agency, a mobile infrastructure capable of mediating between ecological networks, territorial activations, and global artistic platforms. The series produced in 2023—from SORROW (135) to PRIME FACTOR 3X (146–148)—trace a cartography of this transformation. They move through grief, relief, pop, expressionism, loop, radiance, tar, nature, and finally the indivisible constituents of number. Each series is a discrete research unit, yet together they form a coherent field: a durational meditation on how art can hold contradiction, process collective emotion, and construct knowledge through seriality.
SORROW – SO SORRY – THE GRIEF (Series 135)
The year begins with SORROW. The series is announced with a simple, almost clinical definition: "A feeling of deep distress caused by disappointment suffered by others." The accompanying keywords—PAVOR, EXIT, VIRUS, APETITO, ESPUMAS, PERPLEJIDAD—read like a lexicon of the early 2020s: fear, exit, virus, appetite, foams, perplexity. This is not personal sorrow but relational sorrow: distress caused by the disappointment of others. The series acknowledges a collective condition. After the isolation of the pandemic, after the slow time of Ávila, the project returns to the world only to find a world still grieving. Sorrow is not resolved; it is named, listed, and held within the serial structure. The series includes sub-themes of So Sorry and The Grief, triplicating the affect to emphasize its persistence. This is not catharsis. It is documentation. The archive does not heal; it records. And in recording, it makes visible what might otherwise remain diffuse.
RELIEVE (Series 136)
From sorrow, the project moves to RELIEVE—a Spanish word that carries a productive double meaning. On one hand, relieve means relief, the easing of a burden, the lifting of emotional weight. On the other hand, relieve refers to topographical relief: the texture of a surface, the protruding features of a landscape, the three-dimensionality of a sculpture. The series activates both meanings simultaneously. The blog post lists an extraordinary roster of international artists: Julia Soboleva, Louise Bonnet, Leif Nyland, Peter Larsen, Hana Katoba, Kit Boyd, Shadi Al-Atallah, Jurak Florek, Timile Hinoludare, Mari Katayama, Martina Matencio, Genevieve Cohn, Bradley McCrary, Kristen Shiele, Kenechukwu Victor, Bubu Ogisi, Benoist Demoiane, Margaret Durow, Pepa Gordillo, Kpe Innocent, Maria Jurado, Ahmed Umar, Monibelle, Anastasiia Raa, Luisa Torregosa, Claudia Serraima, Chantal Convertini. This is not a curated group exhibition in any traditional sense. It is a relational constellation: artists from different geographies, media, and generations gathered under the sign of relief. The relief is the texture of their coexistence within the LAPIEZA archive. Each name links to an individual post, a node in the larger field. The series suggests that relief—both emotional and sculptural—emerges from the accumulation of diverse voices. The burden is shared; the surface becomes complex.
RETRO POP (Series 137) and RETRO EXPRESSIONISM (Series 138)
Two didactic series follow, marking a deliberate pedagogical turn. RERO POP (the title may be a playful misspelling of retro pop or a reference to the artist Rero) and RETRO EXPRESSIONISM are structured as art-historical primers. The Pop Art post introduces nine canonical artists: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, David Hockney, Tom Wesselmann, and Richard Hamilton. For each, a concise summary is provided, along with a discussion of their differences and connections. The Abstract Expressionism post does the same for Nicolas de Staël, Louis Morris, Kenneth Noland, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, and Willem de Kooning.
On the surface, these posts appear to be simple educational resources. But within the logic of LAPIEZA, they function as operative protocols. By explicitly citing the art-historical precursors of Socioplastics—the gestural abstraction of de Kooning, the color field of Frankenthaler, the mass-media appropriation of Warhol—the project situates itself within a lineage while also distinguishing itself. Where Abstract Expressionism emphasized the heroic gesture of the individual artist, LAPIEZA emphasizes the relational field. Where Pop Art celebrated the commodity, LAPIEZA critiques post-industrial symbolic economies. The didactic series are not digressions; they are theoretical anchors. They make visible the intellectual architecture that underlies the project's serial production. And they serve as a bridge between the earlier, more intuitive phases of LAPIEZA and the explicit epistemic infrastructure that will emerge in 2026.
VOYAGE VOYAGE (Series 139)
The title VOYAGE VOYAGE echoes the 1986 song by French artist Desireless—a synth-pop anthem of escape and longing. In the context of LAPIEZA, the voyage is both literal and structural. After the pedagogical pause, the project resumes its nomadic impulse. The series likely involved travel, residencies, or remote collaborations. But the doubled word (voyage voyage) suggests a voyage within a voyage: the external journey across geographies and the internal journey through the archive. By 2023, LAPIEZA had accumulated over 1,600 nodes. Each new series is also a return to what came before. The voyage is not linear; it is recursive. Each step forward reconfigures the past.
LOOP (Series 140–141)
LOOP makes this recursivity explicit. A loop is a structure that repeats, but each repetition is not identical; the loop accumulates difference with every cycle. The series title names the project's fundamental operational logic. LAPIEZA has always worked through repetition: weekly series, numbered nodes, recurring motifs. But Loop theorizes this repetition as a positive force. The loop is not a trap; it is a generative machine. The series spans nodes 1641 to 1680, a dense block of production. The content of the loop is not specified in the post, but the title alone is sufficient. In the context of 2023, Loop also resonates with the return to biennials and global platforms: the project is looping back to the nomadic intensity of the Expansive Epoch, but with the added depth of the Recreo years. The loop is a spiral.
RADIANCE (Series 141–142)
From the mechanical repetition of the loop, the project moves to RADIANCE. The blog post offers a long, almost poetic meditation on what makes a person radiant: happiness, confidence, kindness, health, inner peace, passion, positivity, authenticity. The list of radiance-inducing qualities is followed by a list of nodes: 1680 DAGA, 1679 CONTRAFUERTE, 1678 COLOR AZUL AMARILLO, 1677 SOLES, 1676 BARANDILLA, 1675 ESCALÓN MOJÓN, 1674 CARGADERO, 1673 LA DUNA, 1672 NUECES, 1671 LIMÓN, 1670 CAMPANA, 1669 AZUCENA COSTILAL DE ADÁN, 1668 PAPIRO ACEBO, 1667 RAIN RAIN RAIN, 1666 PANDERETE TABIQUE, 1665 STONEWALL MURO, 1664 FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE, 1663 EUCCALIPTUS.
The juxtaposition is striking. The abstract qualities of radiance—inner peace, authenticity, joy—are immediately followed by concrete, almost tactile nouns: dagger, buttress, blue-yellow color, suns, handrail, step marker, loading dock, dune, walnuts, lemon, bell, a complex name (Azucena Costilal de Adán), papyrus, holly, rain repeated three times, a percussion instrument, a wall named Stonewall, fire repeated six times, eucalyptus. Radiance, for LAPIEZA, is not an ethereal glow. It is the accumulation of specific things, places, and materials. The series refuses to separate the spiritual from the material. A person is radiant because they have encountered a lemon, a dune, a handrail, fire. The archive is radiant because it holds these encounters.
TAR (Series 143–144)
TAR follows. Tar is viscous, dark, adhesive, primordial. It is what remains after distillation, the heavy residue. In the context of 2023, tar may refer to the emotional residue of sorrow, the sticky persistence of grief. But tar is also a construction material: it binds, seals, preserves. The series includes only two explicit references: 1669 BAR ACACIAS (a bar in Madrid's Acacias neighborhood) and 1686 HERNÁN SALVO (an artist), with a brief mention of 1685 ALINE AUVEZ FLOWERS. The brevity is notable. After the expansive lists of Relieve and Radiance, Tar is opaque, almost withdrawn. It suggests that not everything needs to be explained. Some layers of the archive are dense, slow, resistant to interpretation. Tar is the medium that holds the other layers together.
NATURE BOY (Series 145)
NATURE BOY is the sparsest post of the year: a single YouTube link to the song "Him" by Nature Boy (likely a reference to the 1948 standard "Nature Boy" by eden ahbez, made famous by Nat King Cole). The song begins: "There was a boy / A very strange, enchanted boy / They say he wandered very far / Very far, over land and sea / A little shy and sad of eye / But very wise was he." The nature boy is the wanderer, the outsider, the one who travels far and returns with strange wisdom. This is a self-portrait of the project itself. LAPIEZA, after fifteen years of wandering—from Madrid to Mexico to Croatia to Lagos to Ávila to Galicia—is the nature boy. The song's famous chorus: "The greatest thing you'll ever learn / Is just to love and be loved in return." For a project built on relational aesthetics, this is not sentimental. It is structural. The archive is a machine for producing love: not romantic love, but the love of attention, of documentation, of holding others in the serial structure.
PRIME FACTOR 3X (Series 146–148)
The year closes with PRIME FACTOR 3X. The blog post offers a mathematical definition: "Prime factors are indivisible entities, and each positive integer has a distinct set of prime factors. To determine the prime factorization of a number, one decomposes it into its prime constituents, essentially breaking it down into the smallest prime numbers that compose it." The series numbers (146, 147, 148) are themselves concatenated into a single number: 146,147,148. Its prime factors would be its indivisible components. The series thus performs what it describes: it breaks down the year's production into its smallest units. Each series is a prime factor of the whole. Each node is indivisible. The archive is not a sum but a factorization.
This is the theoretical culmination of 2023. After sorrow, relief, pedagogy, voyage, loop, radiance, tar, and nature, the project arrives at prime factors: the irreducible elements of its own structure. The series suggests that the work of LAPIEZA is not to create ever-larger wholes but to identify the fundamental units from which everything else is composed. Those units are the series themselves—135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140–141, 142, 143–144, 145, 146–148. Each is a prime factor in the factorization of the year. And the year is a prime factor in the factorization of the fifteen-year trajectory. The archive is a number being decomposed, endlessly, into its smallest parts.
Conclusion: 2023 as a Microcosm
The year 2023 is a microcosm of the entire LAPIEZA project. It moves through affect (sorrow, radiance), materiality (relief, tar), art history (pop, expressionism), movement (voyage, loop), myth (nature boy), and mathematics (prime factors). It balances the pedagogical with the poetic, the collective with the singular, the global with the local. It demonstrates that seriality is not a constraint but a generative condition. Each series is discrete, yet each modifies the meaning of the others. Sorrow is not erased by radiance; it is held alongside it. Tar is not opposed to nature boy; it is the medium through which the nature boy travels.
In the broader trajectory of LAPIEZA, 2023 marks the transition from the introspective Recreo epoch to the extroverted Biennials epoch. But the year is not simply a return to pre-pandemic norms. It is a synthesis: the slow time of Ávila has been internalized, and the project now moves through the global scene with a different rhythm—not the vertiginous weekly mutations of 2009–2012, nor the nomadic drift of 2013–2019, but a more deliberate, more reflexive pulse. Each series in 2023 is a prime factor: indivisible, essential, and capable of combining with others to form larger structures. The archive, by the end of the year, has reached node 1727. It will continue to grow. But it will never lose its fundamental unit: the series, the gesture, the node. The map is sense, and in 2023, LAPIEZA continues to swim in all directions.
