WEDGWOOD STEVENTON
11/7 TO 27/8
The Granell Foundation offers another exhibition in its Jóvenes Poéticas Surrealistas series, featuring its own programme.
These are individual exhibitions by young Galician, Spanish and international artists, who reinterpret with their work the legacy of surrealist art. The British artist presents Aviary, made up of 24 collages from 2002 to 2005.
The exhibition reflects on one of the main pillars of surrealist thinking: the idea of freedom. We are dealing with a work full of different kinds of real birds, accompanied by others related to other beings whose freedom has been limited, such as the woman the association between woman and bird is frequent in surrealism. Far from what we might think, the idea of using the caged bird as an unequivocal sign of the loss of liberty is not used here in an obvious way: the birds are enclosed in a cage of memory, of memories, in the old British Coast Guard house in Prussia Cove (Cornwall), where the artist stayed for a week in 2002.
In the text accompanying the exhibition, the artist expresses the feelings experienced in this place, experiences that are essential to triggering the creative process of the work presented in the Granell Foundation:
The house where I stayed was an old Coast Guard house. It was once grandiose, but is now somewhat run down. Grey and decrepit, it is furnished with objects that have seen better days, decorated with paintings by unknown artists and shelves full of books, also by unknown authors. A place full of secret corners and impregnated with a memory-charged atmosphere. It was not a place for a free spirit.
At night the sky was almost completely black. With a few stars and a yellowish lunar disc. In the darkness, you could hear the nocturnal birds above the sound of the sea. Everything exuded an air of mystery that invited exploration
One stormy, rainy day, I began photographing the inside of the house. The idea was to keep the pictures for a future work. Whatever occurred to me. At that moment, nothing in particular
On leaving Prussia Cove to return home, a bird flew over the old building, sounding forth a lament, and disappeared above the sea. Right then, the artist decided to match the photos of the house with a book of collages he found in Paris the year before, and to complete the work with photos of the interiors of his fellow surrealists homes. The artists text clearly expresses his link with surrealism, both in the use of plastic procedures to compose the work, such as the collage, as in the use of mechanisms like the objet trouvé
as well as basing his poetics on concepts such as the search for the wonderful in everyday life (in the poetry and mystery hidden in the world around us) and the valuing of chance as an integral part of the creative process.
