Ismael Iglesias. Solo exhibition. October 23rd Opening by appointment scgallery@scgallery.es
Anormal (Abnormal) is Ismael Iglesias’s second exhibition at SC Gallery. Anormal has been constructed like a labyrinth, such an excessive concentration of images that it produces disorientation. This overwhelming accumulation hinders the leisurely contemplation of each individual image, but it doesn’t prevent it. If you want to see it as a simple scenographic display, you can just take a quick look and leave the gallery. However, if you prefer to gaze away from the screens and try to lose yourself in that incomprehensible space, walking between paintings installed on the floor and walls covered with hanging canvases, you will surely find an incentive not to look for the exit and stay for a long time disoriented in this forest of signs. A good time because Anormal is not only accumulation, but also a wealth of surprises and variety. In the exhibition, the artist has grouped pieces from different periods, techniques, sizes and support mediums corresponding to his last nine years of work.
If you have decided to stay, perhaps things will not improve, because it’s likely that you will not be able to find link union between all those visual stimuli. Artists are supposed to recognize themselves in the mirror and reproduce their reflection. Nevertheless, if you stay, here you will see the fascination for Malevich or Richter, for Larry Poons or Michel Majerus, you will see huge canvases from the Wanderlust series and tiny images of Trash Painting, geometric paintings full of energy and vibration alongside hybrid images without a clear origin, and perhaps you will have the impression that there are several artists in the exhibition. However, there is only one artist that unfolds, hides or shows himself blurred, like a polymorphic ghost. You will also be able to see some looped videos from the Statement series, which will change as the exhibition progresses, in which a prosaic reality refers to the sublime aspects of painting. Better stay for a while and you will possibly find among the pieces known stimuli and chains of associations that will make the whole body of work acquire not a normality of meaning —surely impossible— but a familiarity that link the pieces and turns them into articulated language.
SC Gallery’s white cube disappears and becomes a colored cube due to this tide of paint. This is not horror vacui, but the pleasure of filling the architecture and making it literally vanish behind the display device. To paraphrase Guy Debord, “The exhibition is painting accumulated to the point that it becomes images”[1]. On this occasion, Ismael Iglesias continues his long-standing practice of making paintings explode in the form of an inclusive installation: each painting is a problem posed, but it is only the installation as a whole that provides a (provisional) solution to his work.
What is Anormal about? Surely from the rage of the painter who wants to say a resounding and violent “no” to the normal world, but who has to settle for mixing colors and similar things, painting and taking photos, rolling up canvases, doing carpentry, getting ready-made mechanisms ready, editing videos and sound, answering the phone, negotiating the rental of the studio and also putting all this up for exhibition and sale. This “no” is concentrated in the exhibition and it is expressed in all the art pieces in the room. Anormal is simply, like our own life, abnormal. All this can be seen from 23 October inside the gallery. In the street, at least until the garbage trucks come, the mattresses with their pink words on will remain on the gray sidewalk.
1 “The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images”.
Guy Debord. La société du spectacle, 1967.
Francisco Javier San Martín.
For more information please contact scgallery@scgallery.es
ABOUT ISMAEL IGLESIAS
Ismael Iglesias. 1974. Durango (Bizkaia). Lives and Works in Bilbao (Basque Country).
Iglesias participated in the Espacio Abisal project (Bilbao) and resided in the Delfina Foundation in London. and CCA Andratx (Mallorca).
He is a multidisciplinary artist who has known how to build a plural work with his own style. His proposals, halfway between painting and installation have been shown in several group and solo exhibitions in Bilbao, Barcelona, Madrid or London.
His artwork, highly effective on a visual level, derives from the systematic search within the newest technology. The intention is not so much to capture images in order to canvas them,but to comprehend and accept their articulation speed. This paradigmatic search for the essentials and for the memento in its various stages, allows the artist to blend the achievements of traditional pictorial avant-gardism with the computer screens opaque luminescence by means of systematic fragmentation.
