EVERYTHING NOT SAVED WILL BE LOST: Charlie Stein

Stein’s works blur the boundaries between bodies and objects: padded lovers, latexed torsos, gloved hands — all rendered in luminous, surrealist detail. Her paintings archive fleeting sensations: skin under pressure, intimacy under threat, touch stored like heat in synthetic fabric. In an age of impermanence, Stein insists on memory.

Her canvases become analog hard drives — storing tenderness, resistance, and the shimmer of what refuses to be lost. In the body of work of the exhibition “Everything not saved will be lost”, shown at the Kunsthalle 2, CCA Andratx, Charlie Stein repurposes a now-iconic video game warning, “Everything not saved will be lost”, as both title and central omen. Originally a simple reminder to Nintendo players to save their progress, the message is here transformed into a metaphor for our precarious era: relationships fray, cultural memory fades, habitats vanish — without intentional acts of preservation, all is at risk of slipping through our fingers. Stein’s paintings present figures and things that hover between the fetishistic and the familiar: a latex-coated torso, a gloved hand steadying a needle, padded beings locked in a tender, uncanny embrace.

These bodies — gleaming, distorted, half-humanoid — resist simple readability. They become objects among objects, containers for tension, desire, control and surrender. Inside these lacquered bodies and synthetic lovers flickers a quiet urgency: what do we rescue when the world insists we forget? The padded lovers cling to one another like archival bundles; their embrace is both armor and wound. They speak of connection made monstrous or tender under the pressures of technological mediation, pandemic isolation, ecological fracture.