Rafa Forteza at Plat-

Artist: Rafa Forteza

Exhibition title: Archive

Venue: Plat-, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Date: November 3 – December 16, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist, Plat- and L21 Gallery

Hello!

Welcome back to Plat- after a summer hiatus.

Last year we began Plat- as a space focused on contemporary painting as a way to try understand and investigate contemporary art. This year, we continue our research! Starting with an exhibition by Rafa Forteza.

What we learnt last year was that, no matter how much attention contemporary painters pay to the inside of their frames, what makes their work recognizably contemporary is the acknowledgement and attention spent on the room as a whole. It’s the whole process – right up to installing – that makes it act, look, feel, like art that belongs to this current movement.

Its funny to use the word ‘contemporary’ to name a kind of art as it implies that its defining feature is that it comes from ‘now’. This logic would mean ‘contemporary art’ is the final movement – moving along with us till the end of time. But Contemporary Art is not just that: it is a way of thinking and making and being and presenting, and because of this, it has an aesthetic. For me to claim to know its exact outline would be pretentious. But to say that it is this aesthetic that, on occasion, makes me exclaim (in surprise), “Oh! But it looks so Contemporary!” comes from empirical experience.

For his exhibition at Plat-, Rafa presents work that has precisely been received with this exclamation. The exhibition comes straight out his archive from the 1990s and, besides our aesthetic enjoyment of the work; our enchantment to his energy and playfulness, with this exhibition at Plat- we hope to explore these lines of thought further. How on earth can an archive be contemporary? And what is it about an exhibition, a body of work, that makes us feel it ‘fits’ to this time?

It’s an uncanny experience when a work and its date of creation jar. On the other hand, it happens so often it’s become a bit of an art-speak cliché; or at least a quality that has been given value. Have you ever eavesdropped on fellow exhibition visitors touring around exclaiming, “Oh well it is quite different!”

I don’t know much about Rafa’s work yet, but I’m excited to live with it for the coming weeks. And with an archive full of contemporary exhibition ephemera within the room, I am sure Rafa’s archive, and my archive, combined at Plat- is going to lead to an exciting 6 weeks. We hope you’ll be back to explore with us!

All the best
Plat-

Bio*

Rafa Forteza (1955) is a multidisciplinary artist. He was born in Mallorca and moved, with his works, to Barcelona, Madrid, Collier, New York, Saint Petersburg… until arriving back to the center, in circles. Some parts stayed on the way, in the MNCARS or MoMa. You can see him wandering around, smoking a cigar in the ice cream parlor or reading the newspaper in the morning in the pub of the sports center. His works go out, catch on fire while walking, sparks fly. One on top of the other, like the sculptures, like the paintings, like plastic plugs. From black to yellow, from yellow to plasticine and from this to the brush. And later, or actually earlier, the drawings.

*written by Lucía Marcote García