Lucidity as a Tool to Wound You: The Dark Art of Francisco Jota-Pérez

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Cesc Fortuny i Fabré

In a cultural ecosystem saturated with self-help disguised as fiction and products designed for rapid—indeed, ultra-rapid—consumption, the work of Francisco Jota-Pérez advances a chilling idea: thinking has a cost, and sometimes that cost consists in assuming that the world we have built functions too well for us to abandon ourselves to hope.

A central obsession is clearly perceptible throughout his work: distortion. Distortion of memory, of the self, of the perception of time, but above all distortion induced by the socio-economic and technological structures that organise contemporary life. Jota-Pérez does not merely employ these ideas as ornaments; he incorporates them into the very fabric of the text. Syntax becomes unstable and punctuation is altered. What we find here is a radical coherence between form and content. If the world fragments, language cannot remain intact.

His poetic writing operates as a laboratory in which the music of the poem does not arise from cadence but from tension (that is, from collision) between registers. We are speaking here of the technical language of the social sciences, of technological jargon, of corporeal imagery, and of a voice that oscillates between an essay driven mad by the effects of LSD and an almost prophetic invocation. Within this mixture, technology appears as a total mediator of human experience, and not precisely from a position of enthusiasm nor of rejection, but as a structural fact that reorganises desires, bonds, and ways of being in the world.

To read Jota-Pérez is to accept that literature can continue to be a space for thought, but not necessarily one of consolation. That it can construct dense, oppressive, meaning-laden atmospheres without offering any way out. That it can operate as a dark mirror in which the reader does not fully recognise themselves, yet from which they cannot entirely escape.

One of the most interesting aspects of his work is precisely this way of diluting the boundary between genres. Narrative, poetry, and essay contaminate one another until they become indistinguishable. This capacity does not seem to respond to a vanguardist pose, but rather to the internal needs of the text. When reality presents itself as a system saturated with stimuli, devices, and superimposed discourses, literature that aspires to represent or to interrogate it cannot allow itself pure forms or watertight compartments.

In this context, hyperstition occupies a key place within his narrative: fictions that behave like real entities, or ideas that modify the framework in which they are articulated. The line separating the real from the imagined becomes porous, and the reader is forced to accept that certain narrative constructions do not describe the world, but operate upon it. Jota-Pérez understands very well that the power of fiction does not reside in its verisimilitude, but in its capacity to reorganise our beliefs, very much in the manner of a grimoire.

However, Jota-Pérez’s writing does not surrender itself to adolescent nihilism nor to reactionary nostalgia. It does not idealise any past nor propose utopian solutions. It merely carries the premises of our present through to their ultimate consequences.

Humour, when it appears, does so as a merciless gesture that does not precisely relieve the burden of the text, but rather underlines it. His irony functions as a shock mechanism: laughter here releases nothing, since the reader finds themselves trivialising something that simultaneously horrifies them. This is a dark, acid, sometimes cruel humour, which functions as a mechanism of distancing in order to gain a certain perspective, and not as a tool to rest from narrative density (which can at times be considerable), but rather to introduce a fissure from which what is being said may be observed.

From a formal point of view, his texts appear to be composed of signifying blocks that overlap, interrupt one another, and are reconfigured. Long, subordinate-laden sentences generate a sensation of immersion or of thought in the process of formation. The reader does not move through a linear narrative, but rather through a field of semantic forces in which each image pushes the next.

From a rhetorical point of view, Jota-Pérez’s work displays remarkable precision. Nothing appears improvised, and although the text may adopt the appearance of an overflowing flow, each digression fulfils a function, each image contributes to the construction of a mental landscape coherent in its brutality. An excess that reproduces, on the level of language, the informational and symbolic saturation of the world it describes.

Those who approach his texts would do well to do so without seeking answers, and in exchange will find a rigorous and demanding engagement with language, a constant exploration of how fictions shape the real, and a notable capacity to construct dense, unsettling, and meaning-laden atmospheres, as well as an aesthetic experience that does not underestimate the reader and that trusts intelligence as a form of pleasure.

His extensive body of work has appeared in journals, digital spaces, and a considerable number of novels; Teratoma (Orciny Press, 2017), Endo (Orciny Press, 2019), Modulorama (El Transbordador, 2022), and Máquinas de acción perfecta (Dilatando Mentes, 2023), among others. He has participated in various anthologies, among which Dionisia Pop! (Grupo AJEC, 2007) and Antifuente (Viaje a Bizancio Ediciones, 2008) stand out. He has also cultivated the essay form: Polybius (Antipersona, 2016), Homo Tenuis (GasMask, 2016), and Circlusión (Dilatando Mentes, 2025). He has worked in poetry in Napalm Satori, which was awarded the Ignotus Prize for Best Poetic Work, as well as in his long poem Luz simiente. He has worked as a translator, has been a screenwriter for short films and graphic novels, and has even been a lyricist for the legendary experimental doom metal band Pylar.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons