In MNAC foundation (Cadiz) + Dinner Event in the Carmelitas restaurant (Barcelona)
In collaboration with Montemedio Contemporary Art Foundation (Cadiz), and Nogueras Blanchard Gallery (Barcelona) this project evolves from a permanent intervention in a renewed bunker’s architecture that today holds the Foundation’s offices.
Four panels were made to divide the reception the Foundation’s barrack hut in five spaces. Each panel has a round door and the back wall was substituted by glass to see the exterior garden. In this way, “Passage Garden” plays with the concept of reuse and transformation of space due to the recreation of a Chinese garden in the barrack hut. These gardens’ philosophy is centred on the relation between interior and exterior, the power to model the vision of a landscape at will, creating segments and frame the image in a play of perspectives between the different places inside the garden itself.
From the Montenmedio interventions we designed some painted wooden tables that were used as furniture for a dinner in the Carmelitas restaurant in Barcelona. In accordance with my artistic work these pieces were conceived for collective spaces and suggest a different ways of experimentation with space through painting and the view of art as a social event.
Space is used as a means where “the piece becomes part of space rather than an object in space”. Paintings invade and transform architectural space in an explosion of colour and create a transgression by inviting people to step on them or, as with the tables, to have dinner on them without any precaution at all.
The decorative patterns, that are the nucleus of the piece, are inspired by traditional Taiwanese fabric. The creation process reflects the industrial manufacture of the fabric and traditional decorative arts. Groups of assistants are hired and adjust to mass production methods, working in between classic tradition and modernity. These motives are used due to their familiarity and sensuality, rather than for traditional, iconographic or symbolic connotations. By them we suggest a self-interrogation on exhibition halls, the limit between private and public spheres and the relation between “noble arts” and “decorative arts”.
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