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5/4/2009

Sebastian Nicolau

IVAM Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia

The work that the artist Francisco Sebastián Nicolau (Valencia, 1956) has produced in recent years articulates a stimulating multidisciplinary discourse structured around the fundamental questions that have enlivened his art: the terms in which representation takes place (the elements that define it and the effective impact of its illusory nature) and the plastic possibilities of a spatial experience that swings between two and three dimensions, in both directions.

He is known basically as a painter (and for some time has been hailed as one of the most remarkable representatives of realism, with many exhibitions in Spain and beyond our borders), and this show is a clear demonstration of his excellent qualities with regard to painting (which we might call his natural medium) and also sculpture.

Workin’ (the title of one of the series and also of the exhibition) is a term that alludes to an open quality and a process of activity in which the outcome of the work itself depends on the contributions that it generates as it is being developed. A method of creation that we find in this latest project devised by Sebastián Nicolau, in which process and tautology are combined to explore all the issues that interest him as an artist.

The exhibition consists of works from the series Talleres (Workshops), Cartones (Pieces of Card) and Workin’, in which he uses a variety of techniques and supports, including painting, drawing, collage and sculpture.

In the sequence of spaces in which the exhibition is arranged, items from each of the series are mixed together (in varying proportions) so that the path followed by the visitor may give rise to intersecting or transversal readings that make it easier to perceive conceptual constants which provide the foundation for all his work, presented in different ways and with the use of different techniques and materials.

Despite their heterogeneous nature, the works that appear in the show provide a discourse that is consistent and unified (but, fortunately, not closed). The diversity of their approach to certain subjects and problems is to be understood in the light of what might be called variations, to use a musical term.

Workin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet is the name of a legendary album recorded in 1956 by the famous trumpeter and composer, and it provides the title of this exhibition which, for Sebastián Nicolau, represents “perplexity, surprise at the places to which our interest leads us, the desire to find something else, silence ever present as a response to questioning, respect for the light of the whiteness of the canvas or paper or the space while it is still without whatever is going to occupy it”. And also “a work process and attitude, one of attention to what arises from an action, a way of using events, an approach to what we might sum up as the attempt to achieve rather than the thing that is achieved, rotations around what we do from the centre of ourselves, producing variations from a central point, making movements identical to the preceding ones but revealing a different landscape with each rotation”

IVAM CENTRE JULIO GONZÁLEZ
Guillem de Castro, 118 - 46003 Valencia
Opening Hours:
Tuesday to Sunday: 10 am to 8 pm
Monday: closed
General entrance: 2,00
Students / Student card: 1,00

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