CENTER FOR PRODUCTION AND ARTISTIC CREATION OF SABADELL SABADELL ART MUSEUM LA NAU

Art Museum of Sabadell LA NAU

Acquisition of the model and photograph of the installation “The Artists’ Ship” (April 2002).

Written by Maria Peña, art historian and critic:

“Visit the open workshops of:
DIDAC PINTOR, IRIS ARBEL, JORDI PLANA AND SAM ROUSSEAU

When we are so accustomed to contemplating the achievements of artists within the formal sophistication of museums and galleries, seeing the works in their original setting, the workshop, in the spontaneous atmosphere of the workshop and the presence of their authors, can bring us closer to the artistic fact than to academic disquisition or critical speculation, often redundant and incomprehensible. So much so, that an appropriate representation could be a slight guiding thread, a discreet proposal for interpretation that would guide or help —without conditioning or impositions— the aesthetic response of the visitor.

For this reason, I only intend to note some similarities and differences between the four artists who have been selected this year to carry out their projects at La Nau, while trying to place them in the corresponding theoretical context.

We observe, first of all, a generational concordance and common cultural roots rooted in the Mediterranean basin: Catalonia, France, Israel; as well as a specific, academic and rigorous training, in the respective schools of Fine Arts, which has allowed them to enter the professional world with several individual and collective exhibitions. On the other hand, all four belong, artistically, to a very eclectic postmodernity that oscillates between admiration for the theoretical austerity of the conceptual, the appropriation of the photographic image and digital technology, or the return to the never-exhausted narrative potential of painting. This refers to the affinities in the technique, as well as to the personal projection of the artist in each realization.

Without pretending to be exhaustive, the first observation to make is that two of them, Jordi Plana and Sam Rousseau, confident and forceful in their proposals, work in three-dimensional space: the first, sculptures or installations with a clear minimalist ascendancy that experiment with the plastic, expressive and symbolic possibilities of recycled materials, very much in keeping with the industrial character of the environment. The second, with a Dadaist touch, playing with wit and irony, seeks the complicity of the accustomed spectator or the perplexity of the stranger, in montages where he can use both bodily strategies and the resources of video art or the perverse (that is, artistic) incorporation of the same gadgets with which he admires/ridicules modern technological society.

There are also two other artists, Iris Arbel and Dídac Pintor, who have embarked on a research process at La Nau that, once the obstacles have been overcome, will allow them to reach a successful conclusion. For now, Iris, more identified with the concept of painting-painting that has nurtured the latest neo-expressionisms, expresses her faith in the union of opposites, struggling between figuration and abstraction, dreaming of a harmony that transcends art and reaches life. Dídac, intellectual and hesitant, aware that “now we see in a dark way, as in a mirror that is not very clear”, previously polishes the mirror of the work with the tools of reflection and reading in order to calm the uncertainty that the Pauline phrase evokes: trees of letters, subtle calligraphies, strange alphabets surround the author in the labyrinthine alley.”