Artist: Oriol Vilanova
Exhibition title: To be precise
Curated by: Rosa Lleó and Joâo Laia, The Green Parrot
Venue: The Green Parrot, Barcelona, Spain
Date: April 29 – July 31, 2015
Photography: Roberto Ruiz, images courtesy of the artist and The Green Parrot
The work of Oriol Vilanova (Manresa, 1980) is based on subtle gestures that talk about the power of images and the economy of success. These gestures can be formalised in multiple forms, from architectural installations, to theatre plays to a single small postcard. The work To be precise appears when the artist is invited by The Green Parrot to realise an intervention at an exhibition space in the form of a cabinet. Vilanova is a collector of different types of printed matter and also creator of his own Publisher called “Editions for Friends”. The Green Parrot Cabinet until now hosted projects dedicated to publishers and artists’ books. But Vilanova decided to go further and create a site-specific intervention: to collapse the cabinet with more than 90.000 piled postcards in a way that none of the images is visible. The rest of the exhibition space is empty, generating an opposite to the immense pictorial volume that is concentrated on the cabinet. ¿How many exhibitions can be done with that amount of postcards if framed and displayed on the wall? How much would the economic value increase after having entered the artistic circuit?
Oriol Vilanova visits the flea market each Sunday to select and buy specific postcards for his own collection. He normally chooses them one by one. The millions of postcards from the installation To be Precise have not been selected, The Green Parrot has bought them by lots and groups. The importance was to make a whole piece, reaching the quantity above any specific selection. But in both cases the economy in place has been that of the bargaining in order to get them as cheap as possible, with the same intermediaries, ending up in the specific economy of the art world.
