Poco a poco se va lejos
Joshua Searle
Poco a poco, se va lejos
18 April - 21 July 2026
In Poco a poco, se va lejos (Little by little, you go far), Joshua Searle transforms the gallery foyer into a space of accumulation, repetition, and quiet resolve. Extending across two opposing walls, the installation unfolds as both process and image—one temporal, the other symbolic—together forming a meditation on endurance and cultural continuity.
Over the course of the exhibition, a 17-metre hand-painted wall is inscribed daily with the phrase “poco a poco, se va lejos.” Repeated by hand, the text becomes a record of time passing: a durational gesture that resists immediacy and instead privileges persistence. The act of writing operates as both ritual and labour, each iteration carrying slight variation, collectively building a surface that speaks to effort, discipline, and the slow shaping of meaning.
Facing this, a large-scale wall painting draws from pre-Columbian ceramic and gold figures encountered during Searle’s research in Colombia. Reimagined through his painterly language, these forms are neither fixed artefacts nor direct reproductions, but living references—images that traverse histories of displacement, translation, and survival. They anchor the work in a lineage that is both inherited and continually reinterpreted.
Together, text and image articulate a dialogue between past and present, action and memory. The repeated phrase—at once instruction, reassurance, and inheritance—becomes a quiet assertion of forward movement. In this space, progress is neither linear nor immediate, but cumulative: built through small acts, sustained over time.