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6/2/2007

Art & Language

Galeria Distrito Cu4tro (Old space), Madrid

Art & Language played a key role in the birth of Conceptual Art both theoretically and in terms of the work produced. The name Art & Language was first used by Michael Baldwin and a few other artists in 1968 to describe their collaborative work which had been taking place since 1966-67 and as the title of the journal dedicated to the theoretical and critical issues of conceptual art. The collaboration widened between 1969 and 1970 to include Mel Ramsden, and Charles Harrison amongst others. The collaborative nature of the venture was conceived by the artists as offering a critical inquiry into the social, philosophical and psychological position of the artist which they regarded as mystification. By the mid-1970s a large body of critical and theoretical as well as artistic works had developed in the form of publications, records, texts, performances and paintings. Since 1977, Art & Language has been identified with the collaborative work of Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden and with the theoretical and critical collaboration of these two with Charles Harrison.

Art & Language have been included in many international exhibitions including the Documenta exhibitions of 1972, 1982 and 1997. They have also had several retrospectives in recent years: at the Jeu de Paume, Paris in 1993, PS1, New York in 1999 and at the Musee D’Art Moderne in Lille (2002).

Writing both by and about Art & Language is also copious. Much of it is taken up with the deflation and absurdist exaggeration of the pretensions, manners and knowledge-bases of the day-to-day art world spectacle. Art & Language has stayed as a reference to the art world. Galería Distrito Cu4tro now shows a selection of their recent work.

A new Distrito Cu4tro publication, Art & Language. Escritos, the Spanish version of Art & Language. Writings, published in 2005, which contains texts written between 1980 and 2002, ranging from theoretical work and reviews of books and exhibitions to rock'n roll lyrics and an excerpt from the libretto for an opera, will be launched during ARCO.

“It is a condition of the aesthetic, political and social morale of our own work that it be project-like or essay-like; that it be a response to a problem or puzzle, and not just be hitched on to one of the versions of ‘inner necessity’ by which media-led generic art tends to be rendered consumable. When we say that the work is project-like or essay-like we mean that we do not seek the kinds of spurious psychological and stylistic continuities by which artists’ oeuvres are supposed to be distinguished and out of which their cultural content is partly formed. Instead, we have a conversation of sorts; we try to sustain a discursive, and indeed recursive practice, that looks at itself as well as outward. This conversational practice may be exemplified by – or lead to – at least two forms of production or work: manual, and production of critical and theoretical writing. As we intend it, the conversation is awake to itself as a practice and represents a continuity of sorts, albeit one that could not be tracked in terms of the differentae that would conventionally be used to trace an oeuvre. Our work’s work is not simply to reflect or to instantiate our conversational and inquisitive processes, but also to be part of them. There is no paradox in this."

(an extract from an ART&LANGUAGE text written specially for this show)

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Caetano de Almeida
Cafofo

This exhibition of the work of Caetano de Almeida in Espacio Distrito Cu4tro is the first in Spain for the artist. Caetano was born in Campinas, Brazil in 1964 and now lives and works in Sao Paolo. His work is regularly shown in Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro and is part of the basic collections in the Museums of Modern Art in both cities, as well as in the Museum of Contemporary Art USP in Sao Paolo, and in various private collections.

In his early work, Caetano de Almeida was recreating paintings derived from art history. His canvases invited to reactivate the old relationship with paintings reproduced in magazines, copying the carefully etched graphic images from low definition photographs. In other early work, the artist took from the visual imagination presented in children’s books and in first aid and sports manuals where he reconstituted the images as if they were enlarged mechanical reproductions, bringing him close to the world of conceptual and of pop art.

He quickly went on to explore in his paintings the representation of animals. Then, by starting to use different techniques and materials like marquetry, brass, wire mesh, acrylic and copper, the artist broke with any previously explicit reference to animals and went on to work with the separate elements which characterise them.

In the decade from 1990 Almeida began showing canvases full of representations of animals and plants, using a very rich palette. His work evoked strange feelings in the spectator since it contained no reference to space or time. Caetano de Almeida is now showing compositions with non-figurative shapes, inspired by patterns on cloth picked on his travels in France and India as well as by the stylised forms taken from the work of Jackson Pollock, Alfredo Volpi and other artists.

Galeria Distrito Cu4tro
Bárbara de Braganza 2 E-28004 Madrid - Spain
Opening hours: Monday from 4.30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday from 11.00 a.m. to 2.00 p.m. and from 4.30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

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