In Javier Carro Temboury’s ‘Café Transversal III’ (2023–ongoing), time is envisioned as an aggregate of stacked crockery, compressing the fractured sprawl of life’s coffee breaks into neat, cake-like slabs. Since its debut at Villa Bellville in Paris, ‘Café Transversal’ has unfolded as an itinerant series which begins with a simple gesture: the artist sets up a table laden with cups and saucers bought at flea markets and invites visitors to enjoy a coffee. Afterwards, he submerges the tabletop in concrete, casting all the used crockery in place. The title refers to the satisfying slicing gesture with which Carro Temboury cuts the cast concrete into narrow bars, exposing a tangle of glyph-like forms created by the sunken ceramic vessels. Simultaneously evoking hasty signatures and fossilized bones, these uncanny shapes cite an exchange of voices and gathered bodies – a nod to the embedded, essential role that others play in an artist’s practice.

While recalling both the automatic-writing experiments of the surrealists and their penchant for creating bizarre assemblages from flea-market finds, the terrazzo slabs of ‘Café Transversal’ do more than make strange abstractions from everyday objects. Sparsely placed across the floor of Pech, their minimal aesthetic and muted earthy tones lean towards the industrial and mass-produced, acknowledging both the leisure and labour of hospitality.