The holiday exodus brings art to the Empordà


The Empordà lives not only in music festivals in summer. Art is also present. in Fonteta (Baix Empordà) and from the hand of three important, as well as different, galleries: Bombon Projects, Joan Prats Gallery Y Nogueras Blanchard. The experience was launched last year, when the three rooms, the first two in Barcelona and the third in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, decided to join forces to open a window to creation in the months of less artistic movement, July and August. In the middle of the dog days, it is the low season when it comes to art sales and last summer, in addition, the usual seasonal slowdown was compounded by the ravages left by a pandemic that is still on the rise and a confinement that forced ‘online’ work and closed the fairs, which, by the way, is where the Barcelona galleries do the most important part of the business. So they allied themselves to hold two exhibitions –“a contemporary art project”, they say- in the Empordà, a square with more public than Barcelona during the holiday period.

ephemeral gallery

The experiment was a successso much so that they have decided to celebrate a second edition that is already underway and that will last until August 28. the temporary gallery It has afternoon hours (from 5 to 9 p.m. from Monday to Sunday) and in its debut in 2021 it managed to gather more than 40 people in many of the evening sessions, something not frequent in Barcelona, ​​where despite the numerous campaigns carried out by the rooms to explain that admission is free, there is a public still reluctant to cross the doors of these small temples of art. In this aspect, Fonteta’s project follows the line taken by internationally recognized galleries -such as Hauser & Wirth, Lévy Gorby Gallery and Pace Gallery- with ephemeral rooms that open in spaces far from the big cities with the aim of bringing art closer to the general public.

mutant exposure

There is more, explain those responsible for Bombon Projects, Joan Prats and Nogueras Blanchard, “visits in summer they are leisurely, with time, without the rush that is carried in the city and in the winter season & rdquor ;. That said, last year’s experience was liked and this summer there is repetition, but with varieties. This time it is not about offering two closed and static exhibitions but rather the proposal is a single sample that mutates as the days go by. A proposal that is never the same and that can only be seen in its entirety based on repeat visits.

exquisite corpse

The idea revolves around the ‘exquisite corpse’ concept, which is nothing more than what the surrealists experienced, led by André Breton and Robert Desnos, in the 1920s, when they met to play a game based on the spontaneity of the participants, who had to create an image by seeing only the traces of the contribution of the previous player. The final composition of this exchange is what they called an exquisite corpse and which happens to be a multi-handed work that sought to encourage the collective unconscious. Here the work is the exhibition itself in which each of the artists exhibiting at a given time chooses the creator who will exhibit their art next. The selected works and artists create a chain that results in this mutating exhibition that is never the same and is entitled ‘Revelations on the Formless Sphere’.

artist chain

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the starting point, the creator who gives way to all the rest, comes from the unanimous choice of the three galleries and is none other than Peter Noguera, “representing the Empordà, someone from the land itself with a direct link to space & rdquor ;, they sentence. Not in vain is the artist from La Bisbal and he was a ceramist before being a conceptual artist. But despite having work in important collections and museums such as Macba, he is underrepresented. Not in the Empordà exhibition where, in addition to being the starting point, he has quite a few pieces in the show, including objects from his well-known ‘enfangades’, the ‘performances’ with which he covered all kinds of objects with liquid clay and then let them dry. To start the exquisite corpse, Noguera chose two artists very different from him and very different from each other: the consecrated abstract painter Luis Gordillo already a young woman Anna Dot, which exhibits a sound piece about the kind of insect that Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of ‘The Metamorphosis’, transforms into, and that Franz Kafka does not specify in the work.

From here on, the parade of creators who fill (or will fill) the sample is long: Mercedes Azpilicueta, Lola Lasurt, Pere Llobera, Antoni Muntadas, Jordi Mitjà and Perejaume, among others; and the techniques exhibited, too, from the sculptures of Ludovica Carbotta to the printed cardboards of Broomberg & Chanarin, passing through visual poems, painting, collage… and Noguera’s ‘enfangades’.


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