April 25 – July 12, 2007
Individual exhibition by the renowned Lugo artist Jesús Otero-Yglesias.
Individual exhibition by the renowned Lugo artist Jesús Otero-Yglesias.
This is a show that reinterprets, from a contemporary point of view, the poetics of the surrealist object: the restoration of the common object, lacking in value as a useful instrument or adornment, which is assigned a new value by means of the plastic procedure of the objet trouvé, rediscovered by the artist.
The novelty of this exhibition is the artists analysis of the process generating the surrealist object or objet trouvé. He not only finds a new aesthetic value for common objects such as lemonade bottles, old balls, cardboard boxes… which he brings together and associates with other industrial objects to create pieces with poetical content by means of minimum processing in the studio but also applies this procedure to pieces from the museums collection (already artistic objects) such as certain pieces belonging to Eugenio Granells ethnic art collection. Jesús Otero thereby revives the practices of revaluing objects from other cultures, which were applied in the first surrealist exhibitions of objects in the thirties (the first time that surrealist objects were publicly displayed was at the Exposition surrealiste dobjet in the Charles Ratón Gallery in May 1936), featuring a combination of objets trouvés and objects from other, non-Western cultures such as African masks, kachina dolls of the Hopi Indians, etc. By being decontextualised, such objectives were seen in a new light by spectators.
The construction of looking in Western civilisation is a key factor in the work of Jesús Otero, who has been analysing for years the genesis of artistic objects as well as the dynamics associated with their conservation, location and conveyance of conceptual content, in exhibitions such as Los campos inciertos at the Joan Miró Foundation in 2004 or Museum in the Provincial Museum of Lugo.
