Artist: Gabriel Pericàs
Exhibition title: Processionària
Curated by: Cristina Anglada
Venue: Galería Pelaires, Mallorca, Spain
Date: March 22 – May 29, 2024
Photography: ©Roberto Ruiz, ©Grimalt de Blanch / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Galería Pelaires
Processionària is the title of the solo show by artist Gabriel Pericàs (Palma de Mallorca, 1988) at Galería Pelaires, curated by Cristina Anglada.
Branches, branches, branches, ground, ground, air, branches, branches, branches, branches.
The title of the exhibition is a reference to the pine processionary (also known as Thaumetopoea pityocampa), a type of caterpillar that is found in coniferous trees and that makes an appearance every spring (every year earlier due to the climate crisis), tinged with a certain amount of social distress and concern. These colourful creatures are covered with dangerous stinging hairs—some dogs even die after swallowing them because of the swelling they cause in their airways. Their early appearance in Majorca has caught the safety brigades by surprise, which are responsible for shooting and blowing up the silken, bag-shaped nests where they grow and from which they descend to begin a long, slow procession. Always in line, united by the thread of silk they lay down as they march along.
Gabriel Pericàs’ artistic practice is based on a loquacious and persevering exploration that covers a wide range of subjects, from saliva to lead and curved wood. What he focuses his attention on is flooded with suggestion, triggering—by a process similar to osmosis—our curiosity and astonishment through the use of various discursive and objectual tools. He turns to multiple sources and eliminates hierarchies, while also undertaking an analysis that is not only theoretical— part of his practice relies on a more theoretical approach, such as performative lectures or the writing and editing of publications by like-minded artists—but also focuses on experiential recollection and material experimentation in the studio. His works are the formal result of the execution of protocols. In other words, his pieces are the material outcome of analytical processes.
The main floor of Galería Pelaires features a conceptual landscape made up of three sculpture typologies that Pericàs had already explored in the past, and which he now resumes with the intention of putting a bigger scale into practice. This iterative exercise of continuous and episodic exploration has been an ever-present theme in his work: to think something over and over again, from an increasingly complex approach.
As we enter the gallery, we are greeted by a pile of folding chairs. The promise of an event that requires the participation of an audience keeps us in suspense. It is an exercise involving the sequential assembly of folding wooden chairs that form a group of self-supporting piles. A minimal mechanical intervention allows these everyday objects to become strange and disappear, while we are invited to observe them in a new light, as if for the first time. Finally, we realise that the elements that had kept us in suspense are in fact the event itself.
We also find two new iterations of the Lead Thread sculpture series, made up of assembled fragments of old lead pipes. Discarded due to their toxicity (like the processionary caterpillar, lead also holds the promise of death), the pipes are unearthed—in an almost archaeological exercise—and thrown away. Now stripped of its function of channelling domestic water, lead is rescued from scrap limbo, reused and exonerated as sculptural material. This sequence of pipes forms a kind of narrative layout, the common thread of which materialises as a blow. Coming from an air compressor equipped with a timer valve, the blow becomes obvious in the subtle jiggling of pigeon feathers embedded in the material, coinciding with the outlet thereof.
The series Torsión y articulación is a kind of ensemble made up of variations of the same structure, built through the articulation of wooden parts of traditional Majorcan furniture, characterised by its Solomonic curves. At the heart of this proposal are questions of material and its tensions. The carpenter’s adornments add a soft, flexible look that clashes with the hardness of the material, which becomes even more obvious in contrast to the obligatory nature of its articulation.
It all begins with a question that mutates into another, and so on. In the artist’s mind, the poetic encounter between apparently opposite elements ends up evoking the collapse of everything in between, (perhaps) cancelling out their differences. Pericàs creates objects of a high discursive density the staging of which triggers a series of enigmas that invite us to pull the thread.
— Cristina Anglada
Gabriel Pericàs holds an BFA in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona, and an MFA from Parsons, The New School, New York. He currently lives and works between New York and Majorca.
