Artist: David Bestué
Exhibition title: Miramar
Curated by: Carles Àngel Saurí, Nestor García Díaz and Paula García-Masedo
Venue: Pols, Valencia, Spain
Date: December 20, 2019 – January 31, 2020
Photography: David Zarzoso / Copyright © 2020, All rights reserved. Courtesy of the artist and Pols, Valencia
Pols presents a site-specific project by the artist David Bestué. Miramar displays a series of pieces produced specially for this occasion and connected to the Valencian territory. In the exhibition, the space is transformed into a sieving plant that reduces materials to zero degree.
David Bestué’s sculptural process involves the deconstruction of form through the process of grinding matter as a departure towards abstraction. The artist produces new geometric figures from previously existing matter that has lost its original state: sardine balls, bone ingots or salt prisms.
In the entrance, a series of doors and connecting elements have been taken out of their context and modified: a hinge blown up in size, a key of gigantic measures resting on the wall and a latch in the shape of a lip. This last piece builds an equivalence between the latch and the kiss, representing both the union of two bodies.
From this point on, the shape of the circle is introduced by a perforated door and some screenprint plates. The silkscreen process is equated to the functioning of a sieve, based on the paint that is allowed to pass through the slits. Similarly, fishing nets hang containing art nouveau debris.
In the corridor, a trolley containing antique décor is supported by wheels made from vegetables. Three sand ingots, a bar made of salt and a net with sardine balls connect with the Mediterranean landscape. On the wall, hangs a rectangle of sand and salt. A sieve has filtered rubble, flower and fossil balls.
In the last space stands the junction of two doors, a sieve with 16th century ceramics’ debris, the transition between orange and rotten orange and an accumulation of clocks and flower ingots. On top of the stairs we find a novel, in the form of a table made of paper perforated by an ink bar, and a bowl of bones containing bowel balls sealed by a flower lid.
