´Francisco Goya Reborn In Water´ Castillo de la Piedra Bermeja.

PRESS RELEASE — Goya Renacido en el Agua
Castillo de la Piedra Bermeja, Brihuega.
Open from 5 July to 30 September 2025.
July: open 7 days a week, 11:00–14:00 and 17:00–20:00.
August & September: closed Mondays.

Download the exhibition catalogue in ENGLISH & SPANISH

View the available artworks here.

Renaciendo began in 2020 within the solemn ruins of the Baroque Convento de Los Carmelitas in Budia, Alcarria, where Alexander James Hamilton reopened a site abandoned and disused for over 150 years. In that first iteration, Hamilton collaborated with the local community to clear debris and stabilise floors, walls, and porticos, then hand-fabricated a minimalist, museum-standard lighting system made exclusively from recycled aluminium drinks cans collected from the village and surrounding landscape. This lighting system was donated by the artist to preserve the building and ensure its future cultural use.

Following the exhibition and the artist’s stewardship, the convent’s architecture can now be restored to its original form and host cultural projects of importance for the region — including opportunities for young artists to engage with the space and invite the public in.

As Hamilton has described, Reborn serves as both a poetic testimonial to the vitality of our cultural landscape — past and present — and a beacon of his ‘3R Strategy’ (Reduce, Reuse & Recycle), urging a spiritual re-awakening with nature.

Renaciendo in Budia included large-format photographic works created by collecting detritus and unwanted items from coral reefs, upcycling plastic pollution into hauntingly beautiful underwater PhotoGrams — a camera-less technique that articulates the tension between destruction and hope. Contemporary art, Hamilton argues, too often relies on shock and PR tactics to get ahead; he believes art should not only be beautiful, but also convey profound messages about our fragile relationship with rivers and oceans.

Professor Javier Poyatos Sebastián (Professor of Theory of Architecture and the City, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia) cited the Budia project as exemplary “creative ruralism,” observing that the exhibition constitutes a hymn to a natural world that is disappearing and a denunciation of industrialisation and the pollution of the oceans. In a fascinating space of an ancient religious order, he writes, something magical happens — especially at dusk. His reflections highlight how Hamilton’s site-specific intervention transformed a ruined convent into a living artwork: the Baroque shell became both container and collaborator in an ecological and cultural critique, where shifting daylight, artworks, and the lighting system formed a poetic dialogue with decaying masonry.

In Castillo de la Piedra Bermeja — perched atop its vermillion-hued rock south of Brihuega — Hamilton’s underwater religious portraits find new resonance within medieval stone vaults and narrow apertures. Originating as an Arab stronghold between the 10th and 11th centuries and later expanded through Romanesque and Gothic phases under Christian rule, the fortress now shelters an exhibition where artworks hover between life and afterlife, using water as their painterly medium.

Approaching the castle through the cemetery becomes an intrinsic part of the exhibition’s choreography: visitors enact a symbolic passage from remembrance of mortality toward an encounter with renewal. Within the castle’s textured walls, each photographic artwork was captured on a unique medium — an 8×10-inch analogue film plate — photographed underwater without any form of digital manipulation.

Using hand-made garments and props, the subjects shift into a painterly aesthetic, re-enacting the charged icons of Francisco de Goya. Garments float as if in silent prayer; chiaroscuro recalls Goya’s late intensity yet emerges as refracted apparition, created through the liquid mechanics of water.

The castle’s ambient lighting is supplemented by Alexander’s own discreet lighting modules. As dusk approaches, these portraits enter moments of heightened magic, echoing Poyatos’s account of the Carmelita convent at sunset.

This project extends Hamilton’s ethos of creative ruralism and environmental consciousness into Brihuega’s heritage context. Just as the convent intervention revitalised a threatened Baroque ruin and galvanised community care, Renaciendo at Castillo de la Piedra Bermeja aims to re-awaken appreciation for rural heritage and ecological stewardship.

Each plate is accompanied by documentation of process and provenance — installation photographs and notes on site adaptation — affirming the work’s singular authenticity and its rootedness in this fortress’s first major contemporary art activation.

As readers of the catalogue traverse its pages, they mirror the visitor’s journey: from the corridor of memory evoked by the cemetery approach into the castle’s chambers, where water, light, and stone converge in images that speak of loss, hope, and rebirth.

In this distilled narrative, practical details of visiting and programming are woven into the story itself: the rhythm of daylight in vaulted halls, the hush of ancient masonry, and the fleeting glow of each underwater scene invites deep reflection on history, nature, and our shared future.