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.
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