In turn, Iglesias Brickles's work is embedded in that elusive and ambiguous tradition which limits itself to following a neutral, objective and amoral narration of the events, which involve identifiable or fictitious characters. Something of all this emerges from the artist's own words in an interview he gave years ago to Ernesto Montequin. Talking about the lives of boxers, Iglesias Brickles said that these men are "intensely dramatic, because they synthesize the way in which the mechanisms of this society work, combining success and failure, fame and oblivion. (...) Those lives are thus transformed into Greek dramas that result in tragic deaths, as it was the case of Gatica or Monzdn2".

Apart from the other topics that Iglesias Brickles conceives, establishes and leaves behind throughout a period of more than twenty years, that great theme of fate permeates and contaminates all his work, like a recurrent and ominous dream -and this happens against the artist own wishes, who never favors any kind of emphasis. Maybe -in the words of Laura Isola- that is why he exercises "a shrewd sense of humor" and why "irony becomes apparent through the accumulation of `big themes', the immodesty of the search and the ostensible display of the futility of the cause". As if he were an anatomist numbed by habit, Iglesias Brickles classifies with careful dedication his skinned torsos, his hands pregnant with signs, his perennially smiling skulls. These are pieces that, severed from the force that unifies them, can only find solace in the desert of amnesia.

Moreover, there they are those floating heads that take off the ground, and in so doing, they are
doomed to an unmitigated loneliness. Torn from the support of their bodies and from the nurturing and protecting soil, they are abandoned to their phobias, their obsessions, their sleepless ideas. "Amanecer de una cars" (Dawn of a Face), "El fascista" (The Fascist), "Tajo en la pampa" (Crack on the Pampas), "El mistico" (The Mystic), all point to different sides of the same hell. Fragments that cannot perform the test of imagining themselves as wholes. Beings that lack a defined sense of belonging or identity. Zombies with no bearings. Undoubtedly, Eduardo Iglesias Brickles metaphorically recreates our most recent history, but maybe it is also his secret way of exorcising it.

With his usual keenness, Rafael Squirru notices the same thing when he says: "A product of his time, Iglesias shows us the black shadows of an era in which he has not lost his sense of spirituality. He subjects himself to the dictates of this era only to remind us that we are not just darkness, and that, deeply within our souls, a powerful light still shines". Truly beautiful words, for sure, to introduce a no less beautiful standpoint that attempts to find a balance that does not shirk from the problematic settings of reality.

Now, placing Iglesias Brickles's viewpoint and works in the current scene of our visual arts is no easy task. In a field increasingly plagued by cheap conceptualization, pseudo collective production and technical dismantlement, creators of this caliber can only arouse envy or uneasiness, for in the amorphous Eden of postmodern disillusionment, sticking to more or less defined convictions is regarded as strange -or, to use a highly applicable word to this case: bizarre. And when those convictions enter the work of the one who holds them, the examination consequently shifts from the subject to the object.

"There are times when contempt should be spent sparingly since there are so many people who deserve it." Chateaubriand's bitter and proud words seem to describe to a T a society such as ours, where the cumulative value of effort and the pursuit of excellence are systematically demolished with hostility or indifference, and where a bunch of good-fornothings expects working with art to be within everybody's and anybody's reach with no additional requirement other than making use