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Synthesis for Survival

Artists: Raul Paez, ⥅
Jakob Kolb, ⥅
Kaspar Dejong, ⥅
Jose Manuel Perez Ferrandez,
Arnau Casas Farell ⥅

8-10_07_2016

At THEFLOOR

poster by Roseta Mus Pons ↱

notes from the curator :

my first curatorial effort was a product of soul-searching regarding what i wanted to do with my life ... i had recently moved to Barcelona at 18 years old ... my training was in art , my passion was cinema direction and i didn't know what that could mean for me in terms of a future ... i had a conversation with a film director who i had known throughout my childhood ... she posed the question via chat : "do you want to direct movies because your passion is directing movies or because you just love cinema ?" ... loving cinema wasn't enough to go into a cinema career ... was i an artist then ? a painter ?

the figure of the curator had always interested me ... i thought , in midst of this crisis , isn't a film director and a curator the same thing but in different fields ? would i really be starting from scratch if i were to begin curating ? this sparked my first show ... i had been collaborating as a gallery assistant at THEFLOOR , run by José-Luis Bonet , for some 8 months and i decided to propose a collective exhibition of my own ... originally it was going to celebrate contemporary Catalan expressionism from emerging artists ; specifically young painters and sculptors from my school , Escola Massana , where i was just finishing my first year ... as i began having conversations with different people about the role of the curator , i understood that my concept would have to mature ... i searched for a thread between the artists that wasn't simply the fact that they were abstract-expressionist painters who go to school together ...

i then thought of the curious paradox regarding how expressionism , being so synthetic and reduced , is capable of expressing so much ... this thinking led to the concept : how reducing concepts to simple forms , gestures , colours and textures is a common reaction when one finds themself before a complex problem or crisis ... reducing helps us assimilate , understand , survive ... and maybe expressionism was doing something similar : reducing expression to the raw brushstroke , blob , material ...

although i may not agree with everything i was saying then -which were admittedly rather shallow and unfounded psychological reflections- it signaled to how my future projects' concepts would be derived from empirical data , from personal experiences and theories ... below is the room sheet ↧

THEFLOOR had one primary exhibition space , but given the nature of the work , and the scope , i thought it best to make use of the garage space below the gallery ... it was a functioning garage , and very fortunately , the neighbours didn't mind parking elsewhere for the weekend ... the ruggedness and rawness of the space required innovating ways of hanging the work , mostly on plumbing and electricity pipes ...

i sent the exhibition text to the caterers , asking them to somehow adhere to the concept with the design of the food ... they created Mondrian-inspired deserts using primary colours and intersecting grid patterns ...

special thanks to José-Luis Bonet , to Sonia , to the space , to the artists , to the neighbours and all those that came to support ...