El doble no existe, 2016

 

There is always a suspicion behind all our actions and wills. Someone is watching us all the time from ourselves. The one who does not rest while we sleep, who looks out on the slip and reflexes, who judges us constantly, who takes us as hostages in altered states. Who is this other one?

 

The double is the most trenchant critique to the self-proclaimed integrity of the ego. It causes conflicts and discussions in fields ranging from the philosophical to the social. Is the double a projection of the ego or an entity with its own agenda? Who rules the subject? Is it a neural effect or a symbolic construction? Why this double never disappears? Is it a mythological question? Dichotomy or multiplicity?

 

The project by Erick Beltran, to be displayed in two spaces, Galeria Joan Prats and Joan Prats Warehouse, brings together works and research carried out between 2014 and 2016, as a visual essay or “Bilder Atlas” (iconic atlas), a dialogue that emulates the one established between conscious and unconscious.

 

Erick Beltrán (Mexico City, 1974) lives and works in Barcelona. He has participated in international exhibitions such as Bienal de São Paulo (2014 and 2008), Of Bridges and Borders, Valparaíso, Chile (2013), Tapei Biennial (2012), Biennale de Lyon (2011), Manifesta 8, Murcia (2010) and Trienal de Puerto Rico (2009 and 2004). Among his recent solo exhibitions stand The Fallen Tree, Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco (2015), Atlas Eidolon, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2014), Piezas de juego, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; The Witgenstein Archives/Gallery Volt, Bergen, Norway (2013), La part abyssale, Centre d’art Contemporain La Synagogue, Delme, France (2012), The World Explained, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam (2012), Modelling Standard, FormContent, London (2010), Tolv/Zeigarnik effect, Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (2009), Ergo Sum, Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City (2006), Punch – Drunk, SMAK, Ghent, Belgium (2005). He has exhibited in national and international art centers such as New Museum, New York; CCA Watis, San Francisco; MALBA and Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; WUK Kunsthalle Exhergasse, Vienna; Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; MACBA, Barcelona; Fundació Tàpies, Barcelona; MUSAC, León; cGac, Santiago de Compostela.

El doble no existe / El doble de las mil caras

[The double does not exist / The one-thousand-face double]

 

A shaman letting run his soul off in the shape of a dog.

A patient watching how he is operated while levitating in the surgery room.

The succubus that does not let us breathe during the sleep.

A person having a wake for a mirror upon someone’s death at home.

The homunculus operating from a control room.

Mr Hyde attacking Dr Jekyll.

The werewolf stealing the next harvest to the devil in order to give it to men.

The devil composing a symphony to Tartini.

Policemen destroying the matrixes of fake banknotes

Bonnet looking at 10 cm-height-women wearing a 16th Century-style hair coming into their room.

An artist painting a secret room where the king is getting rotten.

A woman attacked by her own hand.

The king’s doctor taking vital signs of a puppet that is being treated.

Franco caressing Saint Teresa’s hand.

A stone buried in exchange of a seaman who never came back.

Zeus turning into Amphitryon and Mercury into his assistant Sosia in order to seduce an unreachable mortal.

That guy who is looking at us from behind our shoulder.

Some dogs playing poker and a satyr playing the flute.

Two snakes that are a human skull, that is a war goddess that kills her 400 brothers from her mother’s belly.

 

What makes move our organs beyond conscious decisions?

Why cannot we control our dreams?

Why is there the sensation that our consciousness lives inside a body and is not the body?

Why upon death something remains and something leaves?

Who is talking during altered states of consciousness?

Why can we listen to a voice inside our mind?

Does the duplication of something imply the taking of an original?

Why does the unique represent an actual value?

How is built the idea of officiality?

How are these conceptual orders conveyed to a people’s organization?

Why the concentration of truth implies physical strength in the world?

What defines a unity’s limit?

What happens when a body lives inside another body?

What happens when a body is not tied up to the temporary narrative?

Why the beyond world shows up in the shape of spectres, devils and hells?

Under what circumstances can we see ourselves out of ourselves?

When does man perceive himself as a unity?

When does man become  a universe’s reader?

How can extra-corporal journeys be made?

What kind of relationship do fairies, witches, zombies, vampires have with the double’s world?

Can we make the double’s shut up?

 

The man’s ego is the unit under which everything is ordered and classified. Nevertheless a doubt always nests this psyche, another thing looms out through a breach a little further, this is something that denies its independence and ineffability

 

The way that the unity has to understand the universe in all multiplicity is the creation of an alter ego that feeds back the looking.

 

Erick Beltrán

Curated by Ramón Castillo

 

 

The exhibition Habitar el vacío, curated by Ramón Castillo, gathers for the first time four Chileans artists,

Alfredo Jaar, Iván Navarro, Fernando Prats and Raúl Zurita, at Galeria Joan Prats in Barcelona.

 

The four artists, from different conceptual approaches, sensibilities and aesthetic ideologies, perform works of complaint or criticism to human tragedies occurred in different parts of the world, with a language that forces the limit of the visual and textual, through various editorial, material and technologic devices. This extreme dimension of their researches becomes the metaphor of the title Habitar el vacío: art as a way to overcome isolation or lack of empathy among people.

 

Their works converge in the generation of an alert state of the viewer-reader versus territorial, economic, political and social issues affecting people in different places of the planet where hope becomes a revolutionary act. We are introducing the visual and textual research of the four artists who challenge the senselessness and the contemporary experience report.

 

Raúl Zurita (Santiago de Chile, 1950) lives and works in Santiago de Chile. His work is marked by the Military Dictatorship, during which he was detained and tortured. Poetry, performance and urban interventions are part of a repertoire of actions that he developed critically, creatively and interdisciplinarily. Raúl Zurita alternates his literary work, poetry recitals and teaching work at Diego Portales University and Harvard. He has won major awards such as the National Prize for Literature in Chile, Pablo Neruda Award, the Italian Pericle d’Oro Award, the Guggenheim and DAAD scholarships, among others.

 

Fernando Prats (Santiago de Chile, 1967) lives and works in Barcelona since 1990. He has participated in international exhibitions such as Venice Biennale, representing Chile (2011); Mediations Biennale, Poznan, Poland (2012); Canary Islands Biennial (2009); Chile Triennial (2009) and Exposición Universal del Agua, Zaragoza (2008). He has exhibited his work in international art centers such as Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris, Fundació Miró, Barcelona or Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile.

 

Alfredo Jaar (Santiago de Chile, 1956) lives and works in New York since 1982. This artist, architect and filmmaker has exhibited in art centers of all around the world and has participated in biennials such as Venice Biennale (1986, 2007, 2009, and representing Chile, 2013), São Paulo Biennial (1987, 1989, 2010) and Kassel Documenta (1987 y 2002). Among his solo shows there are the ones in New Museum of New York, Whitechapel gallery of London, MACRO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Moderna Museet of Stockholm, and Museum of Contemporary Art de Chicago. He is National Prize for Art in Chile.

 

Iván Navarro (Santiago de Chile, 1972) lives and works in New York since 1997. He has participated in international exhibitions such as Venice Biennale, representing Chile (2009), Prospect2 of New Orleans (2011), la Havana Biennial (2012) and The Disappeared/Los Desaparecidos, exhibition organized by North Dakota Museum of Art that travelled through North and South America from 2005 to 2009. His solo exhibitions include those in Matucana 100, Santiago de Chile (2015 and 2007), Museum of Contemporary Art, Aukland, New Zealand and Sydney, Australia (2015), and Frost Art Museum in Miami (2012).

 

 

The artists will be present during the opening.

A catalogue has been published for the exhibition.

Alex

Alex is a fictional character created by the artiste Pauline Bastard. With the help of an anthropologist, a lawyer, psychoanalyst, stylist, decorator and writer, Alex has been imagined and followed for more than a year in the process of integration in real life, faced with the construction of its social, administrative and emotional existence.

 

The exhibition design allows visitors to slip inside the character’s life: benches and cushions with printed objects, standard furniture and personal effects of Alex, the display evokes a domestic interior and allows to discover 6 videos of Alex‘s life, from its genesis to its “first steps”.

A casting to choose the right Alex, the meetings of professionals, the moments of the construction of a character without a past… we are attending to fragments of the beginning of an existence, a creative process, not an avatar, but a person made of flesh and bone who face up urban and social relations. The result is an experiment movie: neither fiction nor documentary, dozens of hours of film are evidence of the existence of Alex.

 

With this Project, Pauline Bastard raises a number of questions.

How to manipulate the creative form? How to manipulate the natural and the supernatural without falling into chaos?

Alex talks about the construction of identity, of our society. Who is Alex?

 

This project has been awarded by Audi Talent Award and had receive the support of CNAP (Centre National des Arts Plastiques).

 

Pauline Bastard creates complex narratives developed through installations, films and sculptures containing and relating to her experiments. Through collaborations she questions the construction of the self and its place in the contemporary world.

Pauline Bastard creates stories, making them happen, using situations as matter and taking seemingly unrealizable experiences as material for production.

 

We present Fabian Marcaccio’s work in a exhibition titled Family-Group-Cluster-Swarm at Galeria Joan Prats, showing his most recent work, 3 Dimensional paintings that behave like sculpture and installation.

 

As the starting point of the exhibition, Marcaccio researched specifically the meaning of family, group, cluster and swarm in society as well as in painting itself. The viewer is introduced in the first room by a swarm-like pictorial installation. Entering the main room, where a family, group, cluster of 3D works and rope paintings seem to tell a story.

 

Fabian Marcaccio has been one of the pioneers of digital painting in an attempt to redefine the pictorial genre, extend its temporal and spatial parameters, and track the integration of the hand-made and the machine-made. In the nineties, he worked with composition and digital printing and, later on 3D printing, to create pictorial works that he calls Paintants, a neologism from painting and mutant. Marcaccio considers painting as a constellation in content change, sometimes rendered as panels, sometimes as 3D configurations, sometimes as animations, and sometimes on an environmental scale.

 

Fabian Marcaccio was born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1963, and lives and works in New York since 1986. He has taken part in exhibitions at international art centers and museums. His recent exhibitions include Paintant Stories at Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro (2014), Variants at Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno CAAM, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (2013), Some USA Stories at Museen Haus Lange / Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany (2012), The Structural Canvas Paintants at Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany (2012) and at Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin (2011). In 2011 he was awarded the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture.

Teresa Solar

Madrid, 1985

Lives and works in Madrid

 

 

Teresa Solar’s work focus on heterogeneous practices that materialize in audiovisual and sculptural works, in which the languages ​​of the two disciplines connect and interact. However, in recent years, her artistic practice has opted more for drawing and sculpture, with materials such as ceramics or clay, which have been used, since the beginning of humanity and until today, for their insulation properties, resistance and hardness.

 

Based on these elements, Teresa Solar’s work delves into the autobiography, alluding to the daily trips through the subsoil in the Madrid metro or injuries to her own body, to the concern for speech and the organs of phonation, and, at the same time, she reflects on wide-ranging themes, for example related to zoology, geology or space exploration.

 

Along with her interest in the materiality of clay and earth, another figurative language appears in Teresa Solar’s work that moves between the detail of scientific illustrations and the pedagogical representations of Natural History museums, and the brilliant coloring of the fairground attractions, which have resulted in works such as Cabalga, Cabalga, Cabalga or Flotation Line. These are large sculpture installations, which form families with pieces of different sizes, some of them monumental. At the same time, Teresa Solar is an avid sketcher who works with this technique to express her emotions more directly.

 

Vilafranca del Penedès, Barcelona, 1963

Lives and Works in Barcelona

 

 

Since 1990, Eulàlia Valldosera has developed a multidisciplinary work through ink works, photography, performance, installation and video.

 

She uses light, shadow, reflection and movement to create moments focused on the female archetype: the domestic environment, quotidian objects and specific places that create this intimacy, maternity, the body and the male gaze. In answer to the position of the work of art as part of the market economy, she employs her own body as starting point of her creations. Eulàlia Valldosera believes there is a taboo surrounding such corporeality, particularly in Europe.

 

The female body is used as a mean of identification, a beauty subject, on reproduction, contamination and decadence. It is however a flesh machine that must be cleaned and fed.

 

The focus can also shift from the body to the objects that surround it. Objects are transformed into `social mediators´ in her installations: they say something about the culture, the desire, the emotions and the daily life of the people who acquired them. The light brings with it a dark side, the hidden meaning of the objects on the surface. In Eulàlia Valldosera’s world, the shadows, as anti-objects, refer to a collective subconscious.

Enrique Martínez Celaya

Palos, Cuba, 1964

Lives and works in Los Angeles

 

 

Enrique Martínez Celaya works with painting, developing it from the perspective of scientific thought, philosophical, poetic and intellectual.

 

His work brings a permanent concern about experience and representation to light. It is an answer to the surrounding world, especially to nature, the environment of being, and his own perception through ideas that appear over and over again: the child, the sea, the trees, the mountains, the animals, the birds.

 

Enrique Martínez Celaya’s works exposes the possibilities and limits of representation at the same time. His paintings are a poetic way to explore notions such as confidence, symbolism, displacement, fragmentation, integrity, time, memory and identity.

Fabian Marcaccio

Rosario, Argentina, 1963

Lives and works in New York

 

 

Fabian Marcaccio is one of the pioneers of digital painting. Attempting to redefine the pictorial genre, his work extends the temporal and spatial parameters, and tracks the integration of the hand-made and the machine-made.

 

In the nineties, he worked with composition and digital printing and, later on 3D printing, to create pictorial works that he calls Paintants, a neologism from painting and mutant. Marcaccio considers painting as a constellation of changing content, sometimes rendered as panels, sometimes as 3D configurations, sometimes as animations, and sometimes on an environmental scale.

Lola Lasurt

Barcelona, 1983

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

Lola Lasurt’s artistic activity focuses on painting and video and many times also on collaborative processes that confer a universal projection, to her works of a more personal character.

 

The project about the ‘des-time’ can be understood as the analysis and the questioning of a time period, previous to hers. This is one of the main axis of her work, that frequently uses as a starting point elements from the material and aesthetic culture, that reveal behavioral patterns and ideological parameters of a determined era.  

 

Her pieces revolve around the themes of the memory and the oblivion, the nostalgia and the amnesiac need. Lola Lasurt is interested in the historical individual time and its relationship with the guidelines of the hegemonic culture and the construction of collective symbols.

Alicia Kopf

Girona, 1982

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

From the exercise of drawing and writing, Alicia Kopf reflects on apparently individual issues that have become generational concerns.

 

The expressive dimension of her work is related to her studies in Fine Arts and Comparative Literature, studies that allow her to get closer to subjects as diverse as poor housing or the epic of polar exploration from a position that combines both awe and ironic distance.

 

Alicia Kopf’s work arises from a metaphor, which allows her to perform an analytic exercise that will finally lead to different associations. Thus, in her project Articantàrtic, from the appropriation and the reshaping of graphical and narrative documents, Alicia Kopf turns a historical account into a first person narrative concerning resistance, obsession and the idea of conquest.

Annika Kahrs

Achim, Germany, 1984

Lives and works in Berlin

 

 

Annika Kahrs is a Hamburg-based artist who primarily works with film, performance and photography.

 

In her work Annika Kahrs examines representation and interpretation; she is interested in both social and scientific constructs, as well as evolved organic relations such as those between humans and animals. Her films oscillate between obvious staging and documentary-like observation; a distinctive implication in Kahrs’ videos is that she never hides herself in the film, even if her presence is only unveiled in a short glance from an actor to the director, it reveals a singular approach to her environment almost guided by a mathematical process.

 

Kahrs’ videos are like composed choreographies. Music often plays a role in her films, not only presented pictorially or on the audio track, but converted into image; through her selection and the ensuing adjustments during the process of editing partitur turns to film, and, subsequently, this film as partitur can turn into another film in the viewer’s mind.

Hernández Pijuan

Barcelona, 1931-2005

 

 

Joan Hernández Pijuan started painting during the sixties with a style related to expressionism. Nevertheless, during the seventies the empty space started gaining prominence in his paintings such as the geometrical figures. As he mentioned himself, `the space´ became the objective of his work; `I’d say that a constant preoccupation is, and has been finding a space as total protagonist of the canvass. (…) A space as a living element and not as a surface upon which one draws or places himself.´

 

The landscape of his childhood in the town of Folquer have become a pictorial motive in his adult age: Hernández Pijuan resorts to a memory exercise to recreate it synthetically in his painting.

 

The objective of this painter was never to achieve a descriptive or narrative painting, but to emphasize through the monochrome the pictorial technique itself.

Luis Gordillo

Seville, 1934

Lives and works in Madrid

 

 

Luis Gordillo started his career during the fifties when he travelled to Paris and got acquainted with the European art of the time, in particular with artists such as Wols, Dubuffet, Michaux and Fautrier. In his first works the influence of surrealism and Tàpies can be appreciated to which an early seventies Pop art associated iconography would be incorporated in later years.

 

Gordillo becomes one of the permanently renovating painters of the pictorial language and one of the artists that during the early seventies reincorporate figuration. It’s likewise in that moment, when he starts to work with photographic images, that this, in some way or another, is introduced in the process of creation in his paintings.

 

Both ideas, that of the process and the continuous construction as resource of accumulation, are elements that are permanently present in his work.

Evru / Zush

Barcelona, 2001 (from 1946, Alberto Porta, and from 1968, Zush)

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

Alberto Porta adopts the name Zush in 1968 when he consciously initiates the creation of his own world parallel to reality. This world constituted by his artistic work is named “Evrugo Mental State”, which is a State such as a bubble territory.

 

In this state there even exists an alphabet called “asura”, a passport, a flag, ambassadors… His iconography is nourished by images that Evru/Zush has been elaborating from biographic elements: eyes, vital organs, fire, water, etc.

 

From the eighties, Zush incorporates new digital means to his work which boost the interactivity and the relevant role that the spectator assumes. His work aims –according to what he himself has commented in some occasions- to achieve harmony in art, science and mysticism, which would make possible to recover the balance present in childhood.

Carles Congost

Olot, 1970

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

Carles Congost’s work revolves around the construction of personality and the behaviour codes and it is noted by the redevelopment of cinematographic, photographic and musical stereotypes. His work is developed in a harmonic way along with different disciplines –photographs, videos, sound and drawing- incorporating at the same time a classical and ironical treatment to the image.

 

The art world constitutes one of the themes that Congost has incorporated to his recent work, from the theatrical stagings that question the mechanisms, to the dynamics and stereotypes of the art world itself.

Hannah Collins

London, 1956

Lives and works between London and Níjar (Almería, Spain)

 

 

Hannah Collins is one of the pioneer artists in the use of the large format in the photographic discipline. She became known in the international scene during the early nineties.

 

The size of her works is often monumental, however the portrayed theme is often seemingly close to the spectator, incorporating a reflection around the fleetingness of present time and its survival through the memory of places.

 

From 2000, Hannah Collins began to introduce film and video often projected over multiple screens incorporating constructed musical soundtracks. She has maintained a performative element in her work and has expanded her interest in those people and places who inhabit the limit or margins of society and in the future of the human species. Her still images are often located between documentation and precise acted performance. Migration and modern attempts to improve our vision of the future have been subjects in recent works including The Fertile Forest (2015) a work made in the Colombian Amazon, I will make up a Song (2018) and The Earth Beneath My Feet (2022).

Victoria Civera

Port de Sagunt, Valencia, 1955

Lives and works between New York and Saro (Cantabria)

 

 

Victoria Civera’s career began in the seventies, working mainly photomontage. Over the next decade she focused on painting, abstract at first, but then introduced figurativism. In the middle of this decade Victoria Civera moves to New York and integrates photography and sculpture to her practice. Her creations undergo a transformation, making them more introspective.

 

Because of the iconography of her work, focused on the feminine universe, and because of her oneiric content, Victoria Civera has achieved a personal language, full of nuances. She moves in between large-scale pieces, in which she uses industrial materials, and suggested and poetic understatement pieces, often incorporating ordinary household objects.

Cabello/Carceller

Helena Cabello (Paris, 1963) and Ana Carceller (Madrid, 1964)

Live and work in Madrid

 

 

Cabello/Carceller’s work is set in a territory from which they question, reflect and/or fracture the roles or stereotypes associated to gender. They understand identity as something built in conflict or in consonance with a social, cultural, political and economic environment. They point at an `I´ that is always found according to the `others´, this idea vertebrates their production.

 

In their works the patterns, which are linked in a static way to either masculine or feminine roles, are revised. In this way, images are subverted in their works along with behavioral codes and attitudes, associated to that which is commonly considered as masculine or feminine.

 

The rereading that Cabello/Carceller’s work forms in the mentioned models, position the spectator facing multiple prejudice, assumed values and contradictions that manage to effectively destabilize a univocal vision of reality.

Alfons Borrell

Barcelona, 1931 – Sabadell, 2020

 

 

Alfons Borrell is one of the most prominent representatives of lyrical abstraction in Catalonia.

 

After attending the studio of Anglada Camarasa and the School of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi in Barcelona, Alfons Borrell began his artistic career in the fifties, within figuration at first. His work evolved into abstract expressionism and, already in the sixties, to the gestural painting.

 

In the mid-seventies he developed the style of its own, detached of any label, characterized by a sober chromatism that  is consciously disassociated from the material informality. In his painting, the color is imposed on the form, from a language that waives any reference, craving and seeking restraint and rigor.

Pauline Bastard

Paris, 1982

Lives and works in Paris, France

 

Pauline Bastard creates complex narratives developed through installations, films and sculptures containing and relating to her experiments. Through collaborations she questions the construction of the self and its place in the contemporary world.

Pauline Bastard creates stories, making them happen, using situations as matter and taking seemingly unrealizable experiences as material for production.

Calella, Barcelona, 1963

Lives and works in Calella, Barcelona

 

Jordi Alcaraz’s work is a reflection on volume, artistic language and time through a lyrical handling of materials. An abstraction that is the result of the battle against limitations of format and conventions.

 

His work is based on the classical tradition of painting and sculpture and alters the meaning of the foundations of a real and recognizable object, to new genesis of meaning and continent.

 

Jordi Alcaraz transgresses surfaces and materials, gives unlikely uses to his pieces and redefines the logic of frames and methacrylate, of stones and plasters, of mirrors and woods, of shadows and metals; changing perceptions and conventional treatments.

 

He has done different bibliophile editions such as “El Viatge a Tokushima”, with text by Joaquim Sala-Sanahuja, or “Diorames”, together with Joan Brossa, Alfons Borrell, Perejaume and Jordi Rosés.