Yesterday, a solo exhibition of the artist collective Peyrotau & Sediles opened at the camara oscura art gallery.

Peyrotau & Sediles are a powerful exponent of the newest Spanish photography. They exhibited in the USA, Germany and recently in Spain at the Caja Madrid and the Espai Metropolitá d'Art de Torrent (EMAT). Today they present their project "Metus" ("fear" in Latin), a fascinating exercise of uncertainty and shadows in which we experience our own emotions.

This "cabinet of noir photographs", in the words of the curator and art historian Susana Blas, makes us shudder by putting ourselves in the shoes of decadent heroes like Jean Floressas des Esseintes ("Against Nature"), messianic ones like Neo ("The Matrix"), or gothic ones like Nick Cave.

According to Peyrotau & Sediles themselves, fear is both our sentence and our salvation:

"We all have felt fear, we all feel it more or less often. We all could endorse the words of Roy Batty in the film 'Blade Runner' when he confesses: 'Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave."

"Metus" spurs and defies us to face our fears but in this confrontation we find ourselves alone, face to face, with the oldest and most arcane feeling. Our inner side is moved by a gallery of objects and characters that make it impossible to be indifferent to them. On the contrary, "Metus" shows only the essentials, what emerges from the darkness like a ghost, what grips our hearts and leaves us on the verge of a dark and almost black abyss.