December 2005 - January 2006
Rafael Landea returns to Mamá Art Cafe with a series of paintings inspired by an installation created by Chris Cobb where he color-coded all the books in Adobe Bookstore in 2005.
Excerpt from THE COPACABANA PROJECT / VISIONS OF COLLECTIVE STORIES
San Francisco, 2004 / one thousand and one books
Something marvelous happens, I walk in to adobe bookstore, a business that sells new and used books which I always visit on my lunch breaks, and one afternoon as I step foot in there I felt like I was in a dream, like being in another world, red shelves, black, and a spectrum of colors of an incredible delicateness that covered meters and meters of one of the walls.
I get closer and see, it’s true: Henry James was next to Italian or gardening lessons or Jorge Luis Borges! What brought them together?
The color of their spines!!
Then I saw postcards that announced to me that what I was seeing inside was an installation by Chris Cobb, “There is nothing wrong in this whole wide world”.
20 people, one night, 20,000 books… what else does one need???
To tell and retell time and time again, to imagine the people that had embarked on a strange, common cause, working with the happiness and passion of those at play, like a new world after a revolution that was never rehearsed, with the freedom of a child that designs cities with cardboard boxes, that he or she constructs to later deconstruct and reconstruct, like that without a beginning or ending, as if we had nothing else to fix in the world and we committed ourselves to playing without guilt.
I saw them walking down the Copacabana sidewalks, where the wildest new years celebrations take place receiving the new year as if it would be the end of the world, and of course, the beginning of a different one.
But this particular moment of celebration seems to live on forever.
Rafael Landea, San Francisco, 2005
The Copacabana Project, 2005