Category Archives: 2016

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.