The Origin of Forms
2023

Solo exhibition.
Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo – CA2M.
[June, 2023 – January, 2024, Móstoles, Spain]

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In The Best Job in the World (2021), I performed a series of interviews to Spanish artists who had abandoned art, either by their own decision, or forced by their circumstances. These conversations led me to wonder why I am still active as an artist.  This question came simultaneously to asking myself: what conditions and events occurred in the lives of the artists in Art History that could have awakened their vocation and that they could help to develop it along with their talent?

The exhibition The Origin of Forms traces these questions by relating them to the three forms of capital designated by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu – social, economic and cultural capital – as the main resources that an individual has when he or she arrives in the world. The project entails a simultaneous presentation of an ultra-intimate and personal story – in which I propose myself as the main object of study, tracing the possible causes of my vocation from the field of the psychological, the social and also the innate –, coexisting with a more objective examination of the History of Art, questioning and using the artist’s biography as a tool aiming to trace Western artistic genius in a critical way.

The latter is addressed in the large-scale installation Masters of Western Painting (2023), presenting a search I performed in the early biographies of one hundred Western dead painters – from Giotto to Paula Rego –, in official biographical sources –such as Encyclopedia Britannica –, paying special attention to the social and psychological environment in which these artists grew up. This led me to observe existing patterns such as, for example, the connections of their family members with circles of influence and power; the transmission of sensitivity; the family’s frequent opposition to the artist pursuing a career in art; their horoscope – a big majority of them being Aries or Libra –, or the encouragement of their talent by their belonging to a lineage of artists. Overlapping the wallpaper, a series of intervened museum posters showing very famous works by the selected painters hide some of the information behind them. A text in their biography has been outlined with acrylic paint in negative, encouraging the viewers to see the images through this prism.

Installed in the opposite wall of the room, there is a display of several objects related to my family that seek to trace possible origins of my artistic vocation and aptitudes, adressing the forms of capital available during my upbringing, including two amateur reproductions of paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted by my parents, a drawing I made at 7, or a 1:1 floor-plan of a basement in Madrid that my father bought me as a studio. 

Credits:
General installation views and details of the exhibition The Origin of Forms [El origen de las formas], Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo – CA2M (Móstoles, Madrid, 2023). Images: Roberto Ruiz.
Masters of Western Painting – Mark Rothko, No. 5/ No. 22 (2023) 89 x 73,5 cm. [Text: He felt bitterness over his lost childhood.]
Masters of Western Painting – Johannes Vermeer, Het straatje (2023) 70 x 50 cm. [Text: He couldn't feed his large family.]
Masters of Western Painting – Edward Hopper, Hotel Room (2023) 57 x 61,3 cm. [Text: He sold his first painting at the age of thirty-one.]
Masters of Western Painting – Eugène Delacroix, La Liberté guidant le peuple (2023) 50 x 70 cm. [Text: The state continuously sponsored his nonconformist art.]
Masters of Western Painting – Georgia O´Keefe, White Iris No. 7 (2023) 98 x 78 cm. [Text: He stole food to survive.]
Masters of Western Painting – Jackson Pollock, Lucifer (2023) 50,5 x 101,5 cm. [Text: The smell of turpentine came to disgust her.]
Video documentation of a trip to Paris with my father. 8mm film transferred to digital format. 2’41”. Filmed by José Angel Garrido, 1992.