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13/1/2011

Alvaro Perdices

EACC Espai d'Art Contemporani de Castello', Castello'

NEGADA, AbiertA y desnudA [Negated, Open and Naked] is the title of the site-specific project by Álvaro Perdices with and for Espai d’art contemporani de Castelló.

The artist uses the institution—inasmuch as organisation, cultural body and container—as the subject matter for a spectrum of operations ranging from a sculptural intervention in the actual EACC building itself to the role of the centre as an exhibition venue, the management and direction of its projects and the use of the space by visitors.

Inherent in this act or intervention is a reading not far removed from the world of psychoanalysis, with Álvaro Perdices inviting the institution to lie on the couch, in a variety of different positions or sides.

NEGADA, AbiertA y desnudA displaces what should be in its place. An area of the exhibition hall is used as a stage or platform on which to display, over a white carpet flooring, the offices, the employees of the centre and their everyday functions, in a continuous performance of the non-visible albeit executive part of policies and decisions. This clarification brings visibility to what is not open to public view, inviting the spectator to join in a performance closer to a Big Brother reality show in which the different characters and objects are shifted from functional reality to the condition of transitional sculptural forms where function is already part of the critical visuality.

By reverting the functions, the now empty offices are turned into the exhibition venue, in this case featuring the artist’s work. A kind of compilation of works created by Perdices over the last ten years are now inaccessible to us given that the offices are out of bounds to the general public.

With the internal functions on the outside, and those affecting the external on the inside, this project once again proposes a scenario where the roles of space, its functions and those of the spectator are extrapolated, in this case through a sculptural intervention in the EACC building itself, with the artist generating a free space from the external space to an internal space that is excluded from the rest of the exhibition venue and remains inaccessible from the inside of the hall, with the entrance placed outside the building. On the other hand, this sculpture-element posits a rereading of the function of the exhibition space and the works on display, or the works responding to the building that houses or contains them.

In parallel to those three components rearticulating the functions and readings of the institution, as well as the works, their roles and also the spectators, Álvaro Perdices has come up with a body of work consisting of video-installations and photographs that are the outcome of three experiment-actions made on the interior walls of the EACC. Three different groups collaborated in the creation of these three situations: 22 children from Colegio Censal, a school in Castellón; 27 dogs from Servican, an animal rescue centre in Castellón; and 15 students from the School of Fine Arts in Valencia.

A number of exercises were carried out with these groups which—through physical activity, performance, mimicry and instigated action—present and visualise the responses or behaviours of the various bodies and their politicisation in relation to the institutional space. Responses that, from inner reactions, from domains of the unknown psyche, from the transcendent, from the representation of the projected trauma or from resistance, bring to the fore the symptom and the place where cognitive capacity is precisely human inability.

The various filmed recordings of these performances become video-installations rereading and interpreting the physical features of the space.


Álvaro Perdices was born in Madrid in 1971. He graduated in Fine Arts from Universidad Complutense de Madrid and moved to Los Angeles in 1993 where he got his MFA at University of California Los Angeles.

He had his first exhibition at Galería Marta Cervera in Madrid in 1997. Since then, he has exhibited in different national and international venues such as IMAGO, Salamanca (2001), La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2004) or Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2004). Among his group shows are Biennials of Riga, Letonia (2005) and Mérida, México (2007) and in festivals such as LOOP, Barcelona (2008).

His artistic activity has ranged from studio practice to curatorial work, as well as in education, publications and critical writing.

He currently lives between Los Angeles and Madrid.

Image: NEGADA, AbiertA y desnudA, 2011.

Comunication:
Marta Liaño Tel +34 964 723540 comunicacion@eacc.es

Opening January 14, 8 pm

Espai d'art contemporani de Castelló
Prim s/n 12003. Spain
Open to the public from Tuesday to Sunday from 10 am to 8 pm.
Closed on Mondays and public holidays

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