Paulino Viota at fluent

Artist: Paulino Viota

Exhibition title: Contactos

Venue: fluent, Santander, Spain

Date: October 8 – November 25, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and fluent, Santander

fluent announces its reopening in a new venue with a solo exhibition dedicated to the work of filmmaker, theorist and educator Paulino Viota. The exhibition Paulino Viota, Contactos contains a selection of four of his films admist diagrams, film studies and writings that reveal the consistency and diversity of Viota’s sophisticated and complex practice. It also highlights his dialogue with the history of filmmaking and his reflection on the formal language of the moving image. After producing films between 1966 and 1982, Viota has devoted his life to research cinematic languages and he is now hailed as one of the most influential filmmakers of Spain.

Paulino Viota was born in Santander in 1948 and studied Economics at the University of Bilbao. He made his first short film in 1966, and until 1982 has created a body of work that is rich in eccentric, subversive and expansive films. Even if outlined by the specific nature of the moving image, Viota’s work is not confined by it: he also writes, makes drawings, and visual studies, and since 1982 he has had a fundamental practice researching and teaching at different educational frameworks.

Viota’s work is a demanding one due to its sophistication and formal diversity –from formal exercises in structuralist language such as Duration (1970) to the fiction / documentary interplay that characterizes some of his films–.The expansiveness beyond the limits of the screen, the ambiguous status of the moving image and the experimental character of his works are common features of the materials featured in the exhibition and of Paulino Viota’s work at large.

The title of this exhibition takes its title from the homonimous film made in 1970, which in turn refers to Stockhausen’s piece, Kontäkte. However this film was considered as the backbone of Viota’s practice, it is absent from the show, invoked by other works that precede and follow it. The characters and contexts that Viota portrays are of a very diverse nature, crossing the geographies that he traveled, mainly between Santander and Madrid. The films included in the exhibition, in Super 8 mm, 16 mm and 35 mm, were conceived through a series of preliminary studies, drawings and writings, some of which are shown here for the first time.

Contactos presents four films that are crosslinked with a selection of works on paper. The films span his entire productive years and highlight different aspects of the filmic work, both thematically and in terms of formal language. The work of Viota is inextricably linked to the politics of the time, and the exhibition also explores several discursive strategies that the artista has used along the years.

Paulino Viota’s work is part of the MNCARS Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía collection, as well as it has being very present in the programs of the national Film Library, Circulo de Bellas Artes de Madrid and Jeau de Paume in Paris.

Paulino Viota, Contactos, 2020, exhibition view, Fluent, Santander

Paulino Viota, Verbal art in ‘‘Th’expence of Spirit’’ by Shakespeare (After Roman Jakobson)

Paulino Viota, Analisis for the planification of a unity in the Potemkin stairs’ scene

Paulino Viota, El cuerpo del cine (The body of cinema), hand – made booklet including a selection of film stills, texts and collage on the work of Jean Luc Godard