26 September – 10 November 2018
Barcelona
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There is something inevitably evil in analysing the people that you have around. I’ve been seeing Pere in his studio during these last months almost everyday (the other day we caught a cold at the same time and when I told him, I don’t know if he got happy or sad) and this text is a summary of my own ideas about him, the majority of which have not been confirmed.
In his studio the works pile up around Pere as if they were kingdoms of shanties growing around an unmerciful tycoon. They cry out for some care, but all of them feel the signs of age; the too prolonged contact with the epicentre. Certainly everything appears to collapse, and he moves through the chaos like a spider, he crosses squares out of desperation, he rolls around the floor and, meanwhile, talks and talks. In his talk (about his work, obviously) I think I have sensed a type of dissociation between the mind and the hand: the mind wants a thing but the hand seems to want others, like in the cartoon Pinky and the Brain (image), in which a clever mouse and a dumb one have to collaborate in order to conquer the world. I realised this was not only my delirium when I saw one of the works that, I think, will be shown. I also understood there that this exhibition is crucial, and that in fact, it was more than an exhibition.
It is in the painting of Superman who hits himself in which the conflict is made visible. In showing this image in this exhibition I’ve thought to see a sort of ritual suicide, as if he already knew, for a moment, monstrous, and not of excess of muscle but of energy, and decided to turn all this energy against himself. Many artists have done this before. To do this could be an act of contempt against the times that maybe didn’t give to the artist a good reason, a good story, in order to decide to orchestrate his/her efforts in something constructive. These are not his words (they would never be, sometimes suspicious that Pere is full of life) but mine. I imagine: I see in his symbolical act a dark form of self-destructive vengeance against a world that hasn’t managed to excite him with a cause, that has disappointed him by putting in front of his face a society in which vulgarity wins and intelligence looses.
Pere lately listens to a scatological and sick Punk, he laughs like a crazy man while he does it, and I think he tries to match himself with his self-destructive disappointment.
But it is not only this. I’ve seen Pere sitting in a Chinese bar in Hospitalet (where he swims daily inside a really dense magma) comparing himself technically to Velázquez, a comment that it is so arrogant that turns around and makes him innocent. It is also a comment somehow poorly adjusted, as if he was confirming an illness a long time gone: only another being as inventive as him could be afraid to catch it. I think Pere, by staging this suicide in the gallery, could be trying to blow up his virtuosity, and then the Superman painting could be seen as a vengeance against his hand fed up of so many spoiled demands, as a way to deconstruct the building that has taken him so long to raise. Because if this building requires the virtues of time, effort and dedication, it doesn’t have a value anymore. It makes me think in someone who is trying to avoid the moment in which artists become constructive and docile. It makes me think in a jungle that devours itself due to its excessive exuberance.
The hand doesn’t lie: it is ballasted of accents and costumes, and it is sentimental. While the mind can deliver itself to an infinite game of coquetry and mirrors, the hand seems to be more in touch with the drum of emotions, the affections of memory and the visceral attractions. Even though the connections are much more complex than that, it seems that the hand has a channel more direct than the heart, without having to always go through reflection. It is Pinky, who wanders like a lapdog in search of a Brain in order to listen what is the next plan to conquer the world. I vaguely remember, and I know Pere won’t forgive me for this pathetic lesson by the Master of Abundance, a sentence that I read a long time ago and that it said something like this “the mind walks longer, but the heart goes further”. Thinking about this conflict between mind and hand I’ve asked myself where is the heart going, after all. I think I’ve seen something of this in the background of the painting in which there is a Rococo crash barrier on a motorway: even though it is the antique gold piece which should appear to us as an illusion, the true magic success it is in the dull trees of the background, which flash with the softness of the sparkles that gets an agonizing person in the desert, and that make him understand that illusion is, and it always was, in the real and the nearby, and that if it is looked in silence everything is a miracle. Even if the person vomits after, of hunger or fear, and what he has conferred is forgotten, and desperation resumes.
The suicidal person doesn’t know, can’t know what’s happening: his decision must be always blind. This exhibition is an initiation rite: it is the last sign of a ship that is entering darkness
and unknown silence.
Aldo Urbano, 23rd of September 2018.
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