Intentions and Solutions

In Intenciones y soluciones, Rafael Serrano revisits a project initiated in 2008, when his father handed him the keys to his apartment in Caracas before leaving on a trip. Having been asked to check in from time to time, Serrano began photographing the space, drawn to the poetic idiosyncrasies and sculptural logic embedded in his father’s way of living. He returned often to document new domestic configurations and share the results with his father, until moving to France in 2013.

In these images, unseen by the public until now, arrangements of everyday objects take on an unexpected aesthetic weight. A ladder suspended against a window forms a makeshift alarm; champagne corks, marking decades of family birthday dinners, are stored in a jar; multiple lamps have been assembled with elegant economy. Understated but bold, the photographs and their subjects reveal a shared visual language between generations — one born of purpose and ingenuity.

Intenciones y soluciones is not only a return—to the work, to the apartment, to Caracas—but also a reworking, a renewed collaboration between father and son, Rafael Serrano and Rafael Serrano. Through objects, photographs, and sculptural interventions created in response to the venue’s architecture and history, the exhibition reframes the boundaries between the intimate and the artistic, opening new ways for the public to experience these gestures.

The house becomes a theatre, the gallery a home — for a terracotta brick, a smoky tonka bean, or a pickle left floating in a jar of brine. Shifting light sources and stretched tarpaulins shape the exhibition space and our relationship to it. Such subjects evoke memory yet remain unstable. Together, they form an atmosphere that is generative and in flux: part archive, part offering.

The work resists overt personal disclosure despite its layers of intimacy. In doing so, Rafael Serrano proposes a psycho-spatial understanding of home, echoing a Bachelardian sensibility and the radicality of the Arte Povera movement. Intenciones y soluciones is both an homage to the evolving architectures of the everyday and a meditation on the artistic act itself, developed over time and through distance to strike a balance.