Rafael Pérez Evans’ Physical Demand for Compassion at Mostyn Cymru
Picture a window breaking. Perhaps you are driving, and a tiny stone has flown from the road to the window. As the window cracks, a pattern emerges instantaneously. What changes that specific pattern? What stops the glass turning into shards and blowing into the car? Whether glass shatters does not depend just on how hard the blow was. A field of study called glass fracture theory models the way that a pane of glass will respond to force using a complex equation that considers a break as a stress point, a crack length, a brittleness index and other factors. In other words, glass shatters at its weakest point, but when, where and how it does is the result of many structural and environmental reasons. Considerations of glass fractures are almost involuntary on experiencing the latest work of Rafael Pérez Evans, the Spanish-Welsh artist whose piece ‘Brown Noise’( brown noise is the uncanny dissonant tone that creates a sense of discomfort) is on show at Mostyn Cymru, in Llandudno, and which centres around a 10-tonne pile of shattered glass.
With a practice born of a family background in southern Spain during a period he describes as ‘the erasure of agriculture ’, Pérez Evans has long been focused on work that foregrounds the devaluation of people and how devaluation creates ‘eruption’ as an angry response. “People, policy and economics is acting on some of us more than on others”, said Pérez Evans at the opening, and within Mostyn’s light filled Victorian gallery he has created an environment to drive thoughts around togetherness and caring for the weakest during moments of eruption, and the factors that may be coalescing to cause those moments of eruption occur, in those people, at those times.
A huge pile of glittering ice blue glass glimmers attractively opposite a row of chairs familiar to all NHS users, installed by the artist as a reminder of the number of GP surgeries smashed by psychiatric patients in crisis. Meanwhile, Ben E King’s Stand by Me plays softly, with jarring brown noise overlaid, and visitors are invited to accompany the track using stones (like those that smash those GP offices) as percussive tools following a guide on the wall. Surrounding them, pillars representing the files of Dignitas users create a physical reminder of what individual care can look like. Pérez Evans is clear that, as with glass, eruption is the outcome of multiple factors, with some far more vulnerable than others: “With pandemics you see who goes first. How do we stay together, those of us who are deemed to go soonest?”
It’s a compelling and emotional experience, a fragile topic handled with a robust delicacy familiar to followers of Pérez Evans’ career. The artist worked closely with dramaturge Ezra Badou to focus the experience on the creation of togetherness, co-hosting of weekly workshops for self-defining mad and disabled groups in Oxford to surface new ways of thinking about what togetherness looks and feels like, and using the learning to inform the work. Audiences immediately engaged with the rock percussion tools, with strangers tapping and smashing their way together to an intersectional appreciation of social fracture and, because people are not like glass fracture, potentially creating those shared moments of joy and togetherness that rebuild ruptured societies, one moment of understanding at a time.
Rafael Pérez Evans: Brown Notes, 11th July 2026 – 3rd October 2026, MOSTYN
Rafael Pérez Evans: https://www.instagram.com/rafaelperezevans/
Mostyn: https://www.instagram.com/mostyngallery/
