"Piso Cero: Pedro Calapez"
2005-01-20 until 2005-03-31
Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea
Santiago, , ES Spain

The exhibition PISO CERO for the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de Compostela encompasses pieces conceived between 2002 and 2004, some of which had been previously unreleased while others were especially created for this exhibition. It mainly consists of a series of paintings, drawings or watercolours which make up groups of painted surfaces, of different dimensions and supports, arranged on the wall or on the floor, in other words, displayed horizontally or structured in volumes so that they look like sculpture objects, always arranged according to predefined designs.

The supports I use for these pieces of work are aluminium, painted with acrylic, and paper, painted with watercolours or acrylic.

In the exhibition, some of the pieces have taken into account a specific relation with the building’s space and architecture, either with regard to the themes developed or due to their arrangement in the proposed exhibition spaces. The interaction with Siza Vieira’s architecture led me to create a series of drawings, which succinctly describe spaces inside and outside the building, which have been later used in some of my recent paintings.

The title of the exhibition PISO CERO tries to reveal this encounter, that relation with space, the space inside the house, the space that has been covered and beheld, a confrontation with the space built.

The guiding theme and the arrangement of this selection of pieces were found thanks to the identification of two different kinds of relations which had to be present in the exhibition: on the one hand, it witnesses the core of unreleased work through its encounter (and confrontation) with the defined purposes; on the other hand, it considers what brings closer or separates certain series of previous pieces.

Thus, the integration (leading and incorporating, as I always do) of the references to Santiago, to the art centre, to the building, to the architect…, determined the working method. On the one hand, I manipulated the architect’s designs (in this case, Siza), by means of the superposition in transparency of the different floors of the building, hence the piece of work that gives title to this exhibition PISO CERO; on the other hand, I built small painted structures conceived to cover in a methodical and indefinite manner the walls of the room whose development in height is contracted in a bridge leading to a no-exit door...

What interests me about this type of methodology is to investigate from what is already built in a direction opposite to that of its creation, as if we could discover the whereabouts of the architect’s pencil, what he was not able to do due to the imposition of his schedule and project. In the “deformation” of the look over this universe, which has already been built, is where my images appear. From end to beginning, from the outer look to the intimate and personal shape of things. We have to forget about functionalities. We must only see surfaces as if they had been cut over a background. Separating, superposing lines building walls, merging dimensions, deforming viewpoints, distorting the visible. Redrawing space, copying it and chasing the unavoidable distortions.

The idea of transparency appeared in an almost unavoidable manner and determined some of the procedural developments in drawing and painting.

Transparency – a concept which, taken in its simplest form, relates overlapping surfaces which can see each other, from back to front and vice versa, inducing or containing the principle of translucence, that which cannot be perfectly seen but is intuited – presided the realisation of a big set of drawings. Computer-designed and with a graphic language that is closer to comic, they constitute an authentic image bank and they are questioned in an inclusion-repulsion interaction between line and colour. These “virtual pieces of work”, conceived during the summer of 2004, will be materialised in an artist’s book published by the CGAC on the occasion of the exhibition. The page layout of this volume will be structured through a close dialogue with the writer Nuno Faria and stems from the encounter between our images and writings.

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for Spain

Other Important Exhibitions in Santiago