When I first saw in person the artwork that Manuel Gilardi had been preparing for months for this exhibition, I was speechless for almost two hours. This was due to the impact it had on me, his ability to represent the female body in its concrete materiality and eroticism in all its ethereal dimension. The gaze with which he observes the female body, although masculine, is free from the repetitive objectification to which representations of the female body in art, advertising, and social media have accustomed us. This is the central axis within which Manuel Gilardi manages to lead us from a quasi-religious contemplation of the body to a fusion between divinity and humanity.

The indirect influence of disembodied Baroque and Renaissance painting, through the use of digital and artisanal techniques, maximized to achieve a departure from photographic perfection, demonstrating pixels, points, grids, and grains to turn it into pure plasticity, is just one of the many achievements contained in this first part of the tour at Casa Gilardi.

The tour is gradually developed with the use of color and maxi-pixelation Pop first in his series of "Venus," following the corporeal/erotic allusions in his series of flowers/fruits, to culminate with the sacred bodies of the large-format works located in the library and the living room, where the Kantian question about the denial of the possibility of manifesting sexual desire within the framework of the aesthetic pleasure that observing art provides us, becomes real, transforming the sexualized female body image into a sacred image far from all pornography and pseudo-eroticism of magazines.

The second stage of the tour explores with the "in concrete" series the presence of spirituality/lightness. The photographs of spaces and architectural elements in collaboration with Martin and Eduardo Luque, intervened by Manuel Gilardi with red and golden color stains and lines, are opposed to the strength of concrete and the photographed architectural elements, as if the spirituality that entails the creative act remained floating in the spaces, leading us little by little through the tour to an aesthetic culmination of spirituality as an abstract stroke and ethereal presence within a space (the dining room of Casa Gilardi), where color per se immerses us in a state of contemplative amazement and sensory pleasure.

Manuel Gilardi manages to transgress with this exhibition the sacred/religious principles of art, sublimating the sexualized female body, dialoguing masterfully with the aesthetic, mystical, and spatial principles of the work of Luis Barragán in an alliance between color as spirit, mystical lightness, and the body represented as an erotic space and sacred relic.