Nicolás Lamas, The Agony of the Past, 2023

2023

Medium

Portoro Leonardo marble and book

Dimensions

222 × 32 cm

Status

In Gallery Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-155869

“The Agony of the Past” (2023) is a sculpture made of green marble that stands in the room like a massive pillar - a monument between geological temporality and cultural coding. A book with the same title rests wedged between two heavy layers of marble. Lamas strips the book of its function as a repository of knowledge and turns it into a mere representation of information - a carrier of human knowledge in ephemeral form, while the marble bears traces of geology and culture over thousands of years. By keeping the book trapped, Lamas points to the paradoxical character of knowledge: visible but intangible - between epistemic value and symbolic meaning. “The Agony of the Past” thus creates a field of tension between materiality and immateriality, between authority and decoration, content and object. Lamas deconstructs the mechanisms of historiography and cultural tradition by thematizing the book and stone as both carriers of knowledge and status symbols. In this hybrid structure of nature, knowledge and representation, information becomes an archaeological trace whose meaning is only revealed in context.