AGGTELEK, the artistic project of Xandro Vallès (Barcelona, 1978) and Gema Perales (Barcelona, 1982), presents in New Kids on the World a new episode of its expanded universe—an ecosystem populated by creatures that do not represent ideas, but embody them. Characters that do not illustrate concepts, but rather put them into crisis through tenderness, humor, and a strange emotional lucidity.

Through animations, drawings, painting, sculpture, and—for the first time—large-scale inflatables, AGGTELEK constructs a contemporary fable in which “kawaii” operates as a critical strategy. Here, sculptures do not pose: they live, doubt, breathe. They are not displayed as closed objects, but as vulnerable entities, traversed by desires, contradictions, and expectations we recognize as our own.

Laky wants to be human. Snup seems to have reached an ambiguous form of enlightenment. Romeo pursues love with an almost metaphysical obstinacy. They are joined by Made, a shape-shifting extraterrestrial, and Pinky, a pink cat convinced that it is still possible to change the world with ideas. Far from caricature, these characters function as devices for thought—small, sensitive machines that stage the difficulty of existing in a present saturated with promises.

In this sense, New Kids on the World engages in a subtle yet incisive dialogue with contemporary critiques of the life loop into which the pursuit of happiness has turned. As Pascal Bruckner pointed out, the advent of the inessential is not an accident, but the victory of a bourgeois order that still operates today in the form of an imperative: one must be happy. If, during the Enlightenment, the right to happiness was a tool of emancipation, since the second half of the twentieth century it has become a dogma that paradoxically expropriates us from our destiny.

AGGTELEK does not position itself against happiness, but against addiction to its pursuit. Their characters appear suspended in what Bruckner defines as “missing the appointment with destiny,” when everything necessary for a fulfilling life is within reach, yet the obsession with the exceptional event prevents us from recognizing the value of the everyday, of minimal affections, of what seems insignificant. Laky, Snup, or Romeo do not await a grand revelation; rather, they embody the discomfort of living while waiting for something that never quite arrives.

The strength of AGGTELEK’s work lies precisely here: in reminding us that the life we call ordinary is anything but ordinary. Their revolution is not strident, but aesthetic in the deepest sense of the word—a revelation that rejuvenates the world, renders it strange once again, and opens up unprecedented perspectives through fragility and play.

Recognized for its focus on theoretical research into artistic production and its commitment to contemporary ideas, AGGTELEK is characterized by an intrepid, hyperproductive practice deliberately detached from disciplinary hierarchies. Performance, sculpture, video, text, and installation coexist here with a compelling vitality that shuns cynicism. The use of large-scale inflatables—lightweight, unstable, monumental, and precarious at once—reinforces this tension between the spectacular and the vulnerable, between the desire for elevation and the inevitability of the fall.

The result is direct, playful, and surprisingly lucid: a philosophy in take-away portions. A contemporary fable that analyzes our time without losing its smile, and that reminds us, with radical delicacy, that thinking can also be an act of tenderness.

José Luis Pérez Pont