Artist: Rubén Grilo
Exhibition title: Rubén Grilo
Venue: Fundació Joan Miró – Espai 13, Barcelona, Spain
Date: October 2 – December 8, 2015
Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist, NoguerasBlanchard, Madrid and Fundació Joan Miró – Espai 13, Barcelona
From a conceptual perspective, Rubén Grilo engages with the artistic production process through an approach bordering on industrial manufacturing. In the first show in the Fundació Joan Miróʼs Espai 13 series ‘When Lines are Time’ curated by Martí Manen, Grilo abandons the conventions and presents a series of reflections concerning the actual production process in the field of art. Turning to industrial models for inspiration, he presents oblique perspectives with critical potential. Some of the core aspects that define Griloʼs project include the creation of three-dimensional models with human error and gestures embedded in them, the design of impossible products, and the questioning of the conceptual objectives of each element.
What happens when industrial objects, designed for targeted consumption, cease to be so? Or vice-versa: what happens when we observe the field of artistic production from the industrial perspective? These are some of the displacements that Griloʼs project for Espai 13 proposes.
Grilo reviews some basic elements of the artistic process and turns them into artworks or exhibition material, tracing this process back to its origins —the tools themselves— and following through to the end —the final presentation—. For example, at Espai 13 he presents a series of tubes of paint that he designed in collaboration with the company Kremer Pigmente, with a special attribute: they never dry. In this work Grilo does not just create a product, he goes to the root of artistic activity, offering a different temporality by means of technique, and opening up a field of new artistic gestures based on the activation of this new material: works that can never be considered complete, works that cannot be shipped, that permeate spaces and visitors, that provoke artistic accidents that can be difficult to control… Grilo does not just rethink artistic materials, he also turns his attention to elements such as the exhibition lighting and sound as part of his project.
The show is rounded off with several devices that invite reflection on temporality and process, such as metal sheets with abstract constructions that occupy the walls of Espai 13, and chocolate moulds generated using specific, individual blocks of chocolate, in a poetic reversal of the usual production process.
