FONS ÀUDIO #15
Ignasi Aballí
The work of Ignasi Aballí (Barcelona, 1958) explores the relationship between the artist and the spectator and their immediate environment. Day-to-day life in Aballí’s Barcelona studio, and everything that surrounds the artist in other areas of his life, becomes a constant source of ideas for testing the limits of his work as a creator. Thus, in spite of his classical training in Fine Arts, Aballí’s practice quickly evolved towards an almost absolute prevalence of concept.
Gradually, he devised strategies to distance himself from the process and the actual work, as the act of painting became problematic. Aballí broadens his analysis of limits to the formalisation of his works, which often challenge the perception of spectators, and forces them to complete the piece through observation, according to the maxim by which ‘the less there is to see in a work, the greater will be the desire to see it.’The wish to ‘contemplate reality from a different point of view, to change it’ is put in practice by means of commonplace objects, materials and rituals, structural nuances and details that Aballí draws attention to in a discourse rooted in the notions of fiction and hyperreality, both within art and outside of it.
An embodiment of obsessive behaviour, Aballí’s work springs from an artistic practice that combines additive techniques and processes (layers of dust transformed into artworks, the accumulation of information from the media) with subtractive ones (reflections, scripts for unmade films, images deleted with tipex, fluff collected from the filter of a clothes dryer, clear layers of paint peeled off the canvas).
Aballí mines this additive/subtractive binomial to create pieces in which the idea is always more important than the image, and entropy carries more weight than the artist’s gesture, which fades gently in parallel to ephemeral materials and constructions that assimilate the passing of time as an essential part of the creative process.
Bernat Daviu
Bernat Daviu (b. Fonteta, Baix Empordà, 1985) is an artist who considers himself a painter first and foremost. A painter aware that the death of painting has long been anticipated but has not yet arrived. As such, he expands it and allows it to mutate into objects, costume design, dance, performance, video, music, and art installations. He activates painting, sets it in motion, and turns it into a mirror of our surroundings. Daviu is interested in the borderlands between art and non-art. In this podcast, he talks about his 2020 work Stanza, in which painted canvases break free from the frame and start to dance and interact with other artistic disciplines.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with conceptual artist Pere Noguera. Notes on trades and their influence on his work, his use of maps, his homage to Duchamp, and his work with the territory.
Pere Noguera
Pere Noguera is a conceptual artist. Since the early 1970s he has been experimenting with the aesthetic, poetic, and metaphysical possibilities of mud, water, landscape, paper, photocopies, photography, everyday objects, action, and the passage of time. In FONS AUDIO #51, he gives us some insight into works such as "La fotocòpia com a obra document" (1975), "Càntirs" (1976), "Pedra i ganxos de ferro. Sèrie 'Massanet'" (1977) and "Porta doble" (1990).
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with artist Francesc Torres that we were unable to include the first time around.
Francesc Torres
Francesc Torres (Barcelona, 1948) is an artist, essayist, poet, collector, and curator, who has been involved with conceptual art since the late sixties. He has been a pioneering figure in the use of installation as an artistic and narrative device with which to explore the possibilities of the exhibition space, the artistic object, and the interactions that take place between the audience and the art work. Historical memory, understood as a political category, is an another element that runs through his work. In FONS AUDIO #37 Francesc Torres talks about some of his works in the MACBA Collection as he looks back over his years in Paris working with Piotr Kowalski and his early performances in the United States. He also reflects on the aesthetic-political characteristics of installations, on historical memory, collecting, and the role of museums.
Matt Mullican
Through a series of practices designed to examine all the folds and psychological strata of the real, Matt Mullican circles around notions such as virtuality, cosmology, subjectivity, and the idea of a memory theatre. In FONS AUDIO #36 he tells us about life on the other side of the mirror, explains different ways of handling a corpse, and talks about the mind’s endless capacity to create imaginary or parallel worlds.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Ignacio Uriarte that we were unable to include the first time around.
Ignacio Uriarte
Ignacio Uriarte talks about his daily routine as an artist, the demise of the physical office, the persistence of his imaginary, and about procrastination and over-compliance with rules as two different forms of resistance to imposed efficiency and productivity.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Sergi Aguilar that we were unable to include the first time around.
Carlos Bunga
Using ephemeral materials, Carlos Bunga addresses a galaxy of complex notions such as fragility, transience, mutation, and accident. In FONS AUDIO #30 he talks about his early video essays, about how his working process occurs, and about the imminent transitoriness of all architecture.
Sergi Aguilar
Sergi Aguilar talks about his initial steps in the field of jewellery and about postmodernism in Spain during the eighties, and offers us an overview of his artistic career and his working methods through an analysis of his works in the MACBA Collection.
Reflections at a critical juncture: Perejaume, Ignasi Aballí and Eduard Escoffet
Overwhelmed by the institutionalised discourse of politics and economists, we invite artists, philosophers, researchers and poets to share their ideas about what is happening to us, to comment on the positive and negative implications of this structural crisis, and to imagine an uncertain future.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with the Catalan artist Ignasi Aballí.
Àngels Ribé
Àngels Ribé creates works in which space, nature and the body become the articulating elements of a poetics of fragility based on de-emphasising the artistic object, the use of unconventional materials, and a defense of the ephemeral.