When an artist goes to buy canvases, whether from a Fine Arts megastore or a dime store – a situation that applies to all those sourcing their resources from within networks of mass distribution – they will find such materials wrapped in the cheapest and most widespread type of plastic: PET. The artist’s routine gesture is then to tear off this plastic film and to throw it in the garbage. This plastic will then end up in a landfill, where it will be burned, releasing microplastics that will fly away, possibly coming to lodge themselves in our lungs. Or perhaps it will end up in a garbage heap that, while not incinerated, will land in the ocean and choke a fish or a turtle – who knows? We are sufficiently aware of such environmental disasters to the point that we recycle our trash, and yet we – for the most of us – nevertheless contribute to them, in our own ways and through our own daily gestures that have become so automatic that they escape our attention. Mar García Albert averts the disasters of PET plastics by painting directly onto wrapped canvases.
In both its motives and its implications, this gesture is a complex one.
It’s a gesture by which the artist assumes her role in a global, industrial system of the production and distribution of goods, and in so doing, acknowledges her own responsibility for the long-term consequences of such a system. The work bears material witness to the conditions of its own production – a critical approach that places it within the modernist tradition.
This is an antiromantic gesture as well. The plastic film creates a barrier between the painting and the canvas, thus cancelling – both physically and symbolically – the romantic notion of materially inscribing the traces of artistic subjectivity directly onto the canvas. The canvas is never painted. It can’t even be repainted but remains forever available to be painted for the first time.
As a result, the task of conservation becomes more complex than if the paint had been applied to the canvas. How will oil paint age on such a surface? How does PET age? What is to be done if the plastic breaks?
Unprecedented conservation solutions will have to be found. The artist stages an encounter between museum conservation and conservation of the environment. By forcing museums to consider the data of our mass production era, and thus challenging their standards of conservation, she carries out an act of responsibility toward the planet by not simply discarding PET, but transferring it to the space of art, which is a space of infinite conversation.
Text: Vincent Simon
Translation to English: Lou Ellingson
