IGNASI ABALLÍ

Pols, 1995

Dust on glass, variable dimensions.

Un Paisaje Posible, 2007

Vinyl on glass.

Courtesy of the Estrany-De la Mota gallery, Barcelona.

(Productions for the exhibition. Cloister of the museum. First and second floor.)

“To make Pols, I brought powder. After that I moistened the glass with a mixture of water and latex with the help of a very fine spray. Following this I blew the fine dust onto the glass.” An enduring trait of Aballí’s work, the simple gesture of a deposit of powder on to the glass panels of the exhibition room is, paradoxically, essentially pictorial, in spite of the absence of painting. This work embodies the filth of wastage, and the dirty-mindedness of rumour mongering, out of step with the generally immaculate character of the artistic space. A cloak at once repulsive and natural, fragile and invasive, shapeless and sculpturesque, abstract and material. The meaning is romantic, evoking a shared fascination with the footprint left by the passage of time; the slow deterioration by accumulation, reminding us that pure transparency possesses nothing of spontaneity, and that nature challenges this purity.

Pols relates to the renowned Man Ray photograph Evelage de poussiere (1920, representing Marcel Duchamp’s Gran Vidrio covered in a thick layer of powder), reintroducing certain aberrant ideals of transparency, that of visibility tending towards opacity, of hygiene towards insanitariness, and of isolation towards invasion.

Un Paisaje Posible belongs to a series of prints on glass; arrows designating putative elements of the surrounding setting, the consequence of a formal and radical decision not to represent reality in paint, but rather in the naming of precise categories of things. Here we see an unlikely category of natural, chemical and thermal phenomena, in some way prophetic and attentive to the dangers linked to corruption and war, with seemingly illogical associations between invisible, movable and untouchable elements. In making this, Aballí seems to have reconciled the naturalist and conceptual schools of art, opening a window upon the world at the same time as using linguistic markers as a cognitive mediator of reality. However, in spite of his apparent rigour (multiplied by the scientific terms in several languages), this explanatory master system derails, failing to correspond to a changing and chaotic system present on the other side of the glass. The glass, at once protecting and enclosing, barely assuages. This work displays the positive will of transparency to superimpose an artificial filter over an unachievable nature, inviting faith to substitute experience.

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