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Indepth Arts News:
"Josep Bofill: Isolated Spaces"
2004-09-23 until 2004-11-06
Coldcreation
Barcelona, ,
ES Spain
Josep Bofill has exhibited extensively throughout Europe, and most recently in the United States, where he has met considerable success. The one-man-show at Coldcreation, “Isolated Spaces,” represents his premier large-scale exhibition of recent works in Spain. European culture has entered a transition period marked by change. Emerging is a noticeable continuity with tradition, an evolution in accordance with all great civilizations residing in the sentiment to represent the universal, with a human resonance.
And simultaneously, there is a companionable tendency to transform things according to an open, freewheeling process, liberated from any particular source. In both these dialogues the contemporary artist is faced by an untutored but amendable interest in the new.
Josep Bofill reflects a perfect balance between these two positions: his installations all show the truth of such an observation. They are both geometrically self-sufficient and necessarily in touch with nature by way of explicit subject-matter, mutually interdependent and complementary. The causal connection inherent and ubiquitous in Bofill’s stance and oeuvres secures the artists’ reputable status of precursor and positions his works firmly at a sharp interface in the progress of art, society and humanity.
Put simply, the works of Josep Bofill can be understood as a structure of oppositions brought into unity. Behind all things lay such a structure. Nature, society, culture, politics, art, all can be understood in terms of polarities.
On particular polarity is, for Bofill, more important than all the others: the opposition between isolation and unification. This is expressed in a multitude of ways, through a chain of equivalences: the opposition between mind and matter, male and female, inner or outer, luminosity and obscurity, nature and spirit, subjective and objective, individual and universal. Josep Bofill’s works embodies a process of evolution that culminates with their unification: with mind and matter, the individual and the universal coming together in art. The equilibrium of these extremes or the annulment of duality becomes the central focus, the underlying subject of his artwork. It follows that aesthetic beauty is conceived as a harmony between opposing elements.
Josep Bofill’s thrust is straightforward, though he expresses it in different ways: since aesthetic beauty is usually experienced subjectively, even with its utterly basic, universal, plastic means, subjectivity can never escape the individual. For him art can only become absolute by the complete union of the subjective and the objective: by overstepping the ‘limits of art’ and passing from the sphere of art into that of life. Such a move into the ‘sphere of life’ is manifest by way of an internal (in individuals) and outward development (in art). It was this that gave him the incentive for moving outwards from sculpture into the development of chromatic constructions, photography, scenographic installations: he transforms the ideal into reality not just in monumental sculpture but in the environment as a whole.
IMAGE
Josep Bofill
Veladures - 2002
49 x 16 x 8 cm - 25 ex.
Wood, lead, resin
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