David Bestué at garcía | galería

Artist: David Bestué

Exhibition title: Sombra y huella

Venue: garcía | galería, Madrid, Spain

Date: February 2 – March, 2019

Photography: Roberto Ruiz, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and garcía | galería, Madrid

David Bestué is back at garcía | galería with a group of works that travel through the limits of representation, on the edge where something is becoming something else. These works have been made in the last years, some of them very recent and others before them, which show Bestués consistent interest in this moment of transition and ambiguity and in certain technical and material concerns over which he returns periodically.

The fact that a sculpture can combine a practical function together with a symbolic meaning or operate as a metaphor is the case of “Door” in which a sexual one-night encounter is summarized. The dualism between function and representation is the constant thread that runs through the show.

One of the lines of research on these limits is carried out through the materials with which he works, posing a series of contradictions. This is the case of “Duck of duck” in which the sculpture is made, literally, of the represented object, which raises an irresolvable paradox. In other examples, the material adds a poetic or temporal charge that ends up tilting the sense of the object from the purely literal to a wealth of nuances closer to the metaphor.

On the other hand, when rethinking the forms, Bestués concerns are about metamorphosis and duality, two of the topics that have most recently interested him. An apple is not limited to being neither a recognizable form by all nor the matter that conforms it but both can be modified to give rise to a result endowed with new nuances.

Within the tour of the exhibition we must highlight a homogeneous group of sculptures that refer to the body through a schematization of the parts that make them up. They are metallic structures that support elements built on bone dust and that debate on the concave and the duct, on the surface and the mass as basic elements when it comes to representing the body.

David Bestué (Barcelona 1980) has exhibited at the Museo Reina Sofia MNCARS in Madrid, at the MACBA in Barcelona and has participated in group shows at the Ca2m in Madrid, Centre del Carme in Valencia, MUSAC in León.