Room 1 VIRGINIE BARRE PIECES
Room 2 BRUNO PEINADO MASSES |
Dates: March 26 to Aprip 8, 2009
Opening: March 26 at 7:30 PM
ADN Galería, c/Enric Granados 49, Barcelona
Pièces
The work by Virginie Barré (France, 1970) is influenced / feed by different contemporary cultural sources that she reinterprets as ready-mades, or echoing the cut and paste ethos, but in a conceptual way rather than procedural, so her executions are always meticulous, taking care both of the detail in her drawings and the detail in her sculptures and installations. Her sources are big generators of the most renowned popular symbols, being cinema and black series comic her favorites.
Virginie works from special situations, sometimes implausible, and its “mise-en-scène” blurs frontiers between fiction and reality, cinema and life. In this way, she creates strange situations, between the reality and imagination, wakefulness and dream, familiar and sinister. Her mannequins sleep, dream, wear carnival masks and when they are hurt, they bleed. Her works, according to the artist “do not tell stories, but contain them”. Her whole work drives us to an accessible and familiar universe, but also takes us to a trip to the unknown.
In the exhibition Pieces, her principal referent will be the graphic designer Saul Bass, especially in his work on the credits of the film “Anatomy of a Murder”. Virginie appropriates now the shapes that appear in the titles of Otto Preminger´s film, reinterpreting them, playing with them, and finally placing them on the walls painted yellow, blue and brown, spinning them on the wall so that all elements will be suspended, disarticulated.
She will also present her Homme a la womb chair, a sit mannequin on the famous uterus chair, dressed like a motorist and with a baby on his arms. In this installation some contrasts and semantic games are shown; masculinity dressed on leather with absolute feminity of the maternal sweetness, the rigidity of the dress and the safety helmet with the confort of the womb chair. It is all about creating doubt on the extremes, a dichotomical exploration that starts on a formal level, on a strong visual presence, to generate a deeper discourse.
Pieces is the title that brings discursive homogeneity to the whole exhibition. Pieces are the different works that Virginie is presenting, pieces are her cuttings from Saul Bass’ imaginary, pieces are the parts of her installations and sculptures, all them pieces that will be offered to the visitor, who will be able to play with his imagination to reconstruct as a game, with an almost dreamy tone to script of a new story. Virginie proposes the titles, the film can be written with infinity of possibilities starting on her pieces.
Masses
Adopting the concept of artistic “post-production” theorized by Nicolas Bourriaud and the chaos aesthetics of Édouard Glissant´s thought, and impregnated by the Duchampian paradigm typical of French contemporary cultural scene, Bruno Peinado plays with the senses of popular culture, its emblems, its messages, its collective memory, to recreate a symbolical and syncretical ambient, not pretending to freeze its effects, but reactivate them, looking for the potential of the unpredictable. It is undeniable that his Antilles’s origins have defined his trajectory, especially when the artist himself defines his work as a process of creolization of the occidental iconosphere aiming at putting in re-circulation the visual codes and the objects of our media environment. He takes the perspective of an “anti-copyright” culture, which no longer appreciates the myth of creative imagination but affirms the right of being able to make from what is given.
He is a very flexible artist, who does not have a studio or a workshop, preferring to elaborate and develop his own works based on the available space and time in which the pieces are going to be shown. This also makes him an artist in constant movement, who is always putting or removing elements from his works depending on the physical and social context in which he is operating, letting the ideas and influences of around the world flow free, with no ties nor links, pressure or established rules, without stereotypes.
In occasion of the third exhibition of Bruno Peinado in ADN Gallery under the title Masses we present works produced ad hoc, taking as starting point the icon of popular culture Smiley and minimal aesthetics inspired by the works of Californian artist John McCracken. Some big size drawings on wood will complete the exhibition. The Smiley icon was created in 1964 as a logotype for a proximity and sympathetic campaign of the insurance company State Mutual Life Assurance of Worscester to motivate their employees to serve their clients with a smile on their faces. The logotype designed by Harvey Ball was not registered under copyright regulation and in 1970, curiously the year when Bruno Peinado was born, Bern and Murray Spaiky appropriated the Smiley Face adding the phrase “Have a nice day” and proceeded to register what would turn into the symbol of a whole American generation.
Since then the “smiley face” has been reappearing in our iconosphere reaching its height in the 80’s when it was turned into the symbol of the psycho-tropical experimentation. In Masses two versions of the popular icon will be shown: The Endless Summer, aluminum cut-out as an accurate reproduction of the original design, retro-illuminated by a gradual dimmer of on and off that seems to bring live to the Smiley, showing its perennial actuality; and the Fat Smiley, which consists in a monumental installation of four superimposed spheres colored on the generic four-color process for the construction of images in the digital era: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. In the last circumference appears the typical smile of the classical Smiley, although drastically reduced comparing with the original design. The superimposition of the four circumferences suggests the reuse of the icon from the seventies; by reducing the smile, it reflects the impossibility of the icon to create the same positive reaction in the actual period of economical and cultural disturbance; the utilization of standard colors in graphic design, the predominance of the graphics in contemporary culture and the graphic genesis of the icon; and the title refers to the vital maturation of this icon, its humanization process and the commercial overexploitation it has been submitted.
Concerning to the pieces based on minimalist work by John McCracken, six volumes of big dimensions are presented, made of aludibon and painted industrially. Bruno Peinado includes a gestural touch, paradoxically typical of one of the creative movements that was interrupted by the canonical minimalism: Abstract Expressionism. The artist kicks with a baseball bat the bottom side of the pieces generating a “crack” that breaks its minimal common perfection of the pieces inspiring this works. We will also present three volumes in the same register but of smaller dimensions installed on the floor and in which sea fossils seem to have crashed by chance. The collision between culture and nature is brilliantly codified in these pieces that can also be read as vanities booth of the vital fugacity of live organisms and also of the artistic movements. Some big size drawings on wood will finally configure a presentation which global aspect, as common in the artist´s installations, will produce pop fragrances.
