October 2015
by Juan Canela (BAR Project)

Back to school: turbo intensity

We can’t obviate that the comeback to school has been powerful in Barcelona. October began with the first edition in the city of the Gallery Weekend, an event that has been compressed in just one weekend, and activities in other type of spaces completed the programme. One can read in the social network that it would probably be more convenient to call it Barcelona Art Week, in order not to exclude propositions that aren’t galleries…

Some of the projects could only be visited at the weekend, like the programme Composiciones (Compositions), curated by Latitudes (Mariana Canepa and Max Andrews) or the fair Swab, which also took place at the weekend, with different curated programmes that slowly are making a better fair, like Solo Swab with Direlia Lazo and Carolina Ariza, Swab Seed with David Armengol, Myfaf with Rosa Lleó and Zaida Trallero among others.

The Gallery Weekend has been an accelerator that has launched the artistic season. It has instilled a turbo intensity that has made many sweat in their trips around the city; now the question might be how to take advantage of the turbine effect, however proposing a slowdown in time, a type of availability and attention that functions as a whirlwind subtraction. And it is there, where we can point at some of the proposals that we can enjoy this month in the city, that emerge from the whirlwind but that reach further away, and others which will be added into its circulation. We decompress to refresh the sight; we propose a random route that wriggles into different exhibitions that offer spaces of fragmented communications, possibilities of non-lineal communication and absent narratives, where the insecure, the unfinished, the hidden or the unknown are protagonists. Guided by intuition, desire and proximity, we go out for a walk.

To begin near home, on the 9th of October there will be the finissage of The Absent Collector, a proposal by Rafel G.Bianchi and Lúa Coderch at Passatge Studio: a contemporary version of Mariano Fortuny’s El Coleccionista de Estampas, which reunites several artists of the city.

In the centre, The Green Parrot, present The Night is so dark we can hardly see it, the first solo show in Barcelona by Teresa Solar Abboud, who continues her investigation around language, the sign or the lost of control through a series of new photographs, videos and installation.

Nearby, the north American artist Matt Madden presents at EtHall his project 20 lines, in which the dialogue or the relation between drawing and writing through a referent is used as a pretext to activate his work dynamics, and to continue exploring the comic format.

We find more drawing –and more comic- a bit further up, in Galeria Estrany-De la Mota, where Francesc Ruiz presents The Surroundings. A drawing reproduces the perimeter of the block where the gallery is, paying attention to doors and windows as if they were part of a narrative to be activated by frames or vignettes that are simultaneously containers or indicators of the activity taking place around.  Again we can appreciate Francesc’s interests, such as psychogeography or the Situationist detournament, the comic as constructor and switch of reality and the inscription of the work in the immediate context where it is shown.

Going uphill to Montjuic starts When Lines Are Time, the new cycle in ESpai13 commissioned by Marti Manen. Ruben Grilo explores the field of ideas from a mentality closer to the industrial creation. His project shows artistic material which is not strictly finished work, systems of display that can be work or images of consumption with the trace of mistakes and human gestures.

And we finish the route again in Poblenou, where on the 20th of October is the opening of Fins i tot, un paisatge tranquil, a project by Angel Calvo Ulloa that embraces the idea of dissolving, to disappear without leaving any trace and the necessity to deal with certain information in order to face that which doesn’t last.

And since we are here, let’s finish up with a vermut at Tío Ché, in la Rambla del Poblenou to complete the decompression. Ready for another turbo.

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Text by Juan Canela (BAR project) for GRAF