Lo llamamos PABLO
I get super excited about coincidences. Pablo was a friend from school. Pablo was my wife’s ex. Pablo is the name of my favorite artist… It is a name that follows us in a nice way. We even thought about giving that name to our third child. One day, playing with my two older kids in the bathtub, we talked about giving a name to our family group, so we took our initials as a reference. There it was again: PABLO. Paz, Alejandro, Borja, Luis, Óscar.
This exhibition is also full of surprising coincidences, plastic familiarities, names that converge and seem to attract each other. There’s also, if one knows where to look, hidden memories: a filing cabinet in movement, dark drawers which don’t seem to open easily. The color of the cabinet’s interior is almost black, like a nocturnal garden in which images and sensations emerge and activate memory.
Even though it is true that memory acquires many diverse forms, the majority of times it turns into a remembrance. And I’ve decided to follow two memories separated in time. In the year 2011, I was walking down Sant Feliu Street and passed the window of Kewenig Gallery. I stopped to observe the work by Marcel Broodthaers and, at that moment, I was more than surprised, bewildered. Year 2018. In a small living room with two facing sofas, in Lluis Fuster’s studio, I again found myself before that collage of work, in this case from different artists. They formed part of a branched composition, organic, like the slow growth of plants. With the encounter, memory folds, putting into contact different points and waking up the desire to do this project in the gallery starting from two images separated in time.
Maybe we are before a small robbery. I’ve stolen the composition by Lluis Fuster, a subjective accumulation which created a new work in itself. I brought it to the gallery using black and white as a guiding thread to create a curatorial installation project. Maybe the theft goes back to a genealogy that starts way back with the Atlas Mnemosyne by Aby Warbug: the memory with an arborean body, always mutable.
The accumulation and the archive come up with new configurations, a strategy that is present in the exhibition. The works of 38 + 2 participating artists are arranged in the space of the room creating an ideal atmosphere for the generation of thought and experience. Black Garden is a territory to travel, allowing relationships to take us from one place to another. Although it has some coordinates: two facing walls where we see a hanging photograph and a painting by the artist Susy Gómez. Darkness broken by two white roses. Branches growing in the body, like a peculiar family tree. There exists a tension between the tree and the rose, but a tension that’s dissolved in the music and celebration. The loudspeakers have mimicked the vegetation, and maybe they can tell us something of their internal sound, their invisible coherence. What music produces the trunk of a tree?
Óscar Florit
L21 Director
In collaboration with Noguerasblanchard, The Goma, PM8, Horrach Moyà, Polígrafa, José de la Fuente, Fran Reus, Bombon Projects and Cerveza Rosa Blanca.
