Agrupar / Desagrupar

GROUPING_UNGROUPING: BREAKS IN REPRESENTATION
CGAC, Santiago de Compostela, 22 April - 28 June 2016

FOTÓGRAFOS: Mark Ritchie (Ourense) y Manuel González Vicente (fotografía inauguración)

Between the advent of Atlántica and the emergence of Pontevedra’s School of Fine Arts, Galicia has witnessed the development of the work of a long list of artists of varying academic backgrounds and with very different aesthetic ideas and conceptual horizons. In this fertile parenthesis, they fought to broaden the horizons of their work in the most adverse of conditions in a kind of no man’s land where they were always hard-pressed to find any signs to guide and direct them. This gave rise to an exciting diversity of projects and names (at last, a lot of them women’s), larger in number if we compare it to the previous generation. This exciting difference shared a common component which was none other than the self-awareness of artistic activity and the uncontrollable contamination of languages. Theirs were ‘breaks in representation.’

The list of artists that would fit perfectly into this project is quite long indeed. Even so, the selection of artists and their works for the first study included in AGRUPAR_DESAGRUPAR, boiled down to names like Jorge Barbi, Carme Nogueira, Simón Pacheco, Pamen Pereira, Isaac Pérez Vicente and María Ruido. The result is as heterogeneous and multi-faceted as the aesthetic approaches of each individual artist.

A sheer versatility of languages that will be strengthened by the power of each individual boundary and by the appreciable increase it brings about: the narrowing of codes and increasing doubts, the blatant introduction of objects and audiovisuals, of the discourse of genre and natural history. It’s all about artists who had gone astray, coming from a place that this brief time has rendered ‘significant.’

Ángel Cerviño, Alberto González-Alegre, curators