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24/11/2006

Pauline Fondevila

MUSAC Contemporary Art Museum, Leon

November Song

curated by Tania Pardo

Pauline Fondevilla (Le Havre, France, 1972) creates her personal universe out of references from her culture and experience. She works with song titles or mere descriptions of events to recreate strange narratives, associations that surprise by the familiarity with which we ourselves may confront them.

The art of Pauline Fondevila, who lives and works in Barcelona, is based on installation, sculpture and, fundamentally, drawing, combining different cultural references such as the comic, pop music, the Nouvelle Vague and so on. Thus the artist builds her own personal universe with elements that form part of her culture and experience. These include Goya, Gilbert & George, Hieronymus Bosch, Bruce Nauman, Maurizio Cattelan, Los Planetas, Francois Truffaut, Little Nemo and Jeff Wall. Many of her exhibition titles are taken from songs or mere descriptions of events, in such a way that she recreates strange narrations and idea associations which the spectator can feel very much identified with. Such is the case of the show presented at Laboratorio 987, November Song, where the artist is inspired even by the paintings in the Real Colegiata de San Isidoro in Leo'n, especially the one representing the month of November.

Inside Pauline Fondevila’s private universe is Little P., a doll featured in the majority of her works and which even acts as the connecting thread of her oeuvre. In the specific project created for this show, she once more makes use of all her iconographic references through drawing, installation and especially Little P., a character that made her debut in 2005 in Echoesland, a comic created by the artist and Francois Olislaeger. In the exhibitions titled Una extrana manana de febrero en Gijo'n (Parte I) (One Strange February Morning in Gijo'n - Part 1) and Una extrana manana de febrero en Gijo'n (Parte II) -a title borrowed from a song by Nacho Vegas- it becomes clear how Little P., materialised in the form of a wooden sculpture, is also identified with Pinocchio himself, which brings to mind a metaphorical game of idea association. From her desk or her minivan, this doll imagines and conceives a world in which different relations and experiences are established. Thus, Little P. takes us through her universe in a journey of recollections and anecdotes in which we encounter different characters making up her iconography and references. As the artist herself explains, “Every drawing is like a song, self-contained, simple, and easy to look at." Pauline Fondevila’s imagination reveals, in both her drawings and her installations, a constant duality between fact and fiction.

In a nutshell, her work analyses how a culture marked by too many stimuli conditions the building of the “I" and of interpersonal relations. This artist’s drawings and paintings allude to a subjective experience tainted by needs and desires generated by a society marked by rampant consumption. On the whole, her work is a cartographic map of the sentimental.

Pauline Fondevila’s work also includes joint efforts with other artists, like Metacomics (Galerie Sollertis, Toulouse, 2005) and Striptis, (Processos oberts (P_O_), Hangar, 2005) both in collaboration with Francesc Ruiz.

Pauline Fondevila (Born in Le Havre, France, 1972. Lives and works in Barcelona)

She has held individual exhibitions like Una extrana manana de febrero en Gijo'n (Parte I) (One Strange February Morning in Gijo'n - Part I) (Galerie Sollertis, Toulouse, 2006), Una extrana manana de Febrero en Gijo'n (Parte II), (Galeri'a Estrany - De la Mota, Barcelona, 2006), Echoesland (Sabadell Art Museum, 2004) and L’amour romantique a e'te' invente'... (Galerie l’Attrape-couleurs, Lyon, 2003), and has participated in group exhibitions such as Trait d’union (CRAC, Se'te, 2005), World painting. El mundo como lo imagino o como creo que es (The World as I Imagine It, or Fear That It Is) (Galeri'a Estrany - De la Mota, Barcelona, 2005) and Playlist (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2004).

Laboratorio 987, the MUSAC’s project room
Laboratorio 987, the MUSAC room for specific artistic projects, is an additional space that operates independently of the Museum’s general programme. The first artist to intervene in this space was Silvia Prada (Ponferrada, 1969) with the specific project Hot or Not, from April to May 2005. Her show was followed by the video project by Fikret Atay (Batman, Turkey, 1976) titled Sonidos lejanos/ Distant Sounds: Then Abigail Lazkoz (Bilbao, 1972) carried out the project Esconde la mano (Hide Your Hand) from September to October 2005. The artist Ryan McGinley (New Jersey, USA, 1978) also presented the photographic exhibition Between Us / Entre nosotros from November 2005 to December 2006. Wilfredo Prieto (Santi Spi'ritus, Cuba, 1977) designed his installation Mucho ruido and pocas nueces II (Much Ado About Nothing II), from December 2005 to March 2006. Finally, Monika Sosnowska (Ryki, Poland, 1972) staged her Untitled from March to May 2006. From September to November 2006, Phillip Frolich will exhibit his canvases under the title Exvoto. Where is Nikki Black?

MUSAC
Avda. de los Reyes Leoneses, 24 - Leon

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