From September 21 to November 22, 2024
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Species of Spaces is a text published by George Perec in 1974. Talking about space and time is a recurrent theme in artistic discourses and, nevertheless, also an excuse to avoid talking about other topics that today are undoubtedly more present in artistic production, such as the body, identity or nature. In the past, when space was named, it was usually a place, an institutional place, a place to show or from which the artistic work was created. Today, space is a species, that is, a living being. Space has gone from being geometric to being a state of mind, anxiety; or a necessary mood, empathy; or even, the space from which to imagine how bees see the world or how machines exert their influence and impose their voice. Who hasn't already asked chatGPT for a favour? Like the oracles of yesteryear, poor chatGPT also has its place. The expanding memory has at least its "cloud", a place symbolically recognisable by all, but chatGPT does not yet seem to have a throne, a stone, a pedestal or a home...
Yes. To imagine space is to imagine the possibility of establishing relationships with physical elements, abstract elements, virtual elements and programmed elements. Yes, we have evolved. It seems that we are adding dimensions to the real world century after century. Adding strangeness that also needs its space.... As anxiety grows, conflicts multiply, difficulties become evident and our space diminishes. It also diminishes our capacity to be foolishly happy, without needing to have reasons for it. With the loss of space, we also lose the feeling of lightness we had when we were young, and we become heavy, even boring. The best description of this state can be found in the wonderful short story "Don't You Blame Anyone" (1956) by Julio Cortázar. The plot is our present: A gentleman is in a hurry because he is supposed to meet his wife to buy a wedding present. He starts to put on his blue jumper and can't find the sleeves. Nerves turn to anguish and the scene ends tragically when, after struggling with the jumper and his hands, he gets tangled in his sleeves so badly that he falls from the 12th floor.
Do you still want to question what art is for? I would say, without hesitation, that art helps us put on millions of "blue jumpers" without jumping into the void. Indeed, if there is one thing that all the artists proposed here have in common, it is their capacity to generate spaces, spaces that expand our capacity to interpret the immediate space so that we at least have the impression that our capacity to be in the world is actually real and positive. Being in the world is an expression that indicates that we occupy a place that is not only the place of the function we have in society, a space that goes beyond our role at work, in our family, in our circle of friends. Our ways of living often don't allow us to know who we really are apart from those roles or the way others see us. The paradoxical forms of art (which seem to make no reference to what really worries us) are designed to make us discover what actually worries us. The works that we are displaying here do not ask you for your approval or your taste. They ask for your friendship, for you to spend time with them (because an exhibition should be seen more than once) so that you learn something about yourself through the particular examination of each work.
At first glance it might seem that the works featured in this exhibition have little to do with each other. Just as the people in this space contemplating the works may have nothing in common except the fact that they are people. There are many ways of conceiving exhibitions. An exhibition can be seen as an opportunity to delve into the family traits, the formal typologies, the similar languages that bring one work closer to another. But an exhibition can also be an opportunity to explore everything we have in common when our eyes don't help us in this task. On one of my first trips to Berlin I rented a room and lived with a wonderful couple. My German was so bad that I couldn't even understand who they were or what they did, unless they wrote simple phrases in a notebook in the kitchen, which ended up being our particular "interpretation" centre. On the second day of being in that house (a house with rooms as big as an entire flat in my hometown) the girl left a paradoxical note: "How many of you are there? I thought it was just you!" I looked alarmed at the correspondence we had exchanged when renting the room, knowing that I often used the plural because it was easier to conjugate than the singular, and that I might have said "We will arrive" instead of "I will arrive" on Monday. But no. It was all in the singular form, and my letters always talked about me, no one else. With the help of my heavy Herder dictionary, I wrote back: "It's only me. Why are you asking that?" Her reply didn't take long to come: "Sorry, I went into your room to leave you a copy of the keys and saw many different clothes hanging from the rack. I thought there were two of you." I didn't understand until some time had gone by, and I realised that the two of them dressed exactly the same every single day. They always left the house in black trousers, a black T-shirt and black short jackets. Their shoes were also black and so were their socks. Both always wore a wide black leather belt and black horn-rimmed glasses. She had fine straight hair like that of an Asian girl, black, with a short fringe and a geometric cut above the ear. He had hardly any hair left and completed his outfit with a black hat similar to those worn by retired ship captains in TV series. They dressed exactly the same during the nearly four hundred days I spent with them. To my surprise, not only four items of clothing hung on the rack in their room, but a huge number of black trousers, shirts, T-shirts and jackets. "I like to dress very differently," I wrote in our notebook. My admiration for their style and appearance endures to this day. It's no wonder that such guarantors of coherence and impactful looks thought I had a severe personality disorder. I wore a different outfit every single day, without any attachment or loyalty to a particular shape, colour, era or style. My respect for their style lesson was so high that it didn't take me long to dress in black myself. All black. My long, straight hair fell down to the centre of my back, giving the sensation that the clothes didn't belong to me... Theirs was a masterly exercise in terms of rigour, whereas in my case it made me look like a Galician grandmother wearing techno clothes that did not fit at all, from the size of my chest to my shoes, which were too small for a gothic lady. I immediately realised that I could never belong to that family, and that made me feel like a lasagna with different layers of sadness: not belonging, the punishment of an endless search for my own style, and the sorrow that those childless beings would not welcome me in their home now that everything had come to light...
Something similar to what I felt during that time in Berlin chased me in my art history classes. Studying works by genre and typology re-triggered old traumas in me. The pressure of the desire to succumb to the charm of similarities left me breathless.
An exhibition is the creation of heterogeneous spaces. Spaces that are formally and emotionally very different but which are capable of creating a glorious feeling through difference: complementarity. Orange peel (sculptures of peeled oranges by Ana Laura Aláez), with their rough crocheted skin, do not appear to be directly related to Mathilde Rossier's high-voltage pylons. While Rossier's work has been deeply concerned with the transformation of millions of hectares of land into industrial crop fields that produce energy (like these electricity pylons) for the people, Ana Laura's oranges bear little or no relation to agriculture. In fact, they are more akin to the buttocks increasingly affected by the sedentary lifestyle in front of the millions of screens that are powered by the electricity generated by the large pylons portrayed by Mathilde Rossier. The portrait of the great infrastructures that cross fields and destroy the natural environment of so many living beings are those that feed and make possible these unique oranges, so different from the natural oranges... Insignificance is the great pandemic. No one talks about this expanding feeling that makes us all reactive and even makes an increasing number of people feel an unbearable resentment that overflows as a result of social media. Rasmus Nilausen's work deals with a kind of contemplation that no longer contemplates images but our feelings of helplessness, our confusion. The assembly of legged paintings is titled Theatre of Doubts. It is a strange lesson in the history of art, explained by pieces that no one can put together in order to form a coherent image of a community, of a country, of a common horizon to which to aspire with joy. The same pieces that do not form the portrait of a finished space appear in Andrea Büttner's work. Andrea is interested in the actual gesture of bending. Bending before power, bending in the face of idleness and yielding to attitudes and behaviours that we might have considered unacceptable a decade ago. Or simply bending in order to carry out agriculture work like those who harvest crops by hand, as not all products cannot yet be harvested with a machine, such as asparagus. While the hands of Andrea Büttner's farmworkers are buried in the earth, Ramiro Oller's brass cut-out hands are in the air. They are actually hands stripped of their bodies. Hands that live an autonomous life like the leaves that fall from the trees and are and are not part of them. It is beautiful to see how the metal in Ramiro's hands becomes something light that allows him to create light hands, ready to send a greeting into the air, generous, intertwined but also totally disconnected from the world. Janet Cardiff's watercolours speak of this disconnection and its importance. Janet, who has dedicated her life to exploring technology and sound as substances that guide us to other realities within the reality perceived by our limited senses, now chooses the quickest medium, watercolour, to capture moments in our daily lives. There are a multitude of wonderful moments enclosed in an afternoon of bathing in the icy ocean waters. Only an attentive watercolourist is able of capturing that energy in the rare moments as the water dries with colour on the paper. Watercolours are perfect for a diary. A diary in which we remind ourselves how precious the world and those around us are, because in the next instant we have already forgotten. Our lives are a tangle of contradictions and our best wishes are like stones trapped in a beautiful metal structure. José Davila has managed to capture in Acapulco the paradise of all our contradictions, of our minds, swarms that think one thing and constantly do another. Nobody knows more about these contradictions than Rebecca Horn. She is an expert in creating impossible objects, and she knows better than anyone that inventing formal and aesthetic mechanisms is necessary to endow inert matter with life, hope and meaning.
This is my way of reading the incredible spaces that the works create. I admit that I have no great affinity with the hackneyed metaphors that proclaim to put the mind in blank. This invitation to mental blankness is an invitation to an emptiness that I find annoying. In reality, we don't need the blank or the emptiness of our minds to write new stories. The capitalist idea of "starting from scratch" is killing us. It is killing the need to accept what we are, our mistakes, our desires and contradictory opinions... Starting from scratch, making our minds blank, believing in virtues without mistakes... all altruistic impulses that turn us into bums. Lazy people incapable of any form of generosity such as the generosity that oozes from works of art, the presence of artists in our society. An infinite generosity that only asks for our presence in the acceptance of their way of inventing coexistences between different worlds that would not fit into any corporate plan. More fertile than a blank mind is a mind constantly exposed to art, to poetry, to conversation with friends... A healthy mind is a mind that is not afraid to have anything taken away from it, to be smothered with demands, to be embraced with expectations. Is there a bigger, more diverse space, more willing to give itself to all those anguished, self-absorbed and sad minds than the one created by an exhibition? Are there safer spaces than the spaces created and cared for by artists? To see an exhibition and come out humming... that could be the beginning of the end of our monstrous idleness.
Chus Martínez
Galeria Pelaires has received a grant from the Consell de Mallorca and ICIB to realize this exhibition.
