Trained in scenography, Pep Duran Esteva (Vilanova i la Geltrú, Barcelona, 1955) has developed his artistic career around concepts such as representation, construction and staging. As the title of this exhibition indicates, the artist’s work draws on the formal and thematic vocabulary of dramaturgy to deconstruct the plane of reality we live within.
His works juxtapose abstraction and figuration, setting up a dialogue between the object and its representation that seeks to inspire a new perspective on what we recognise and know as real. With this aim in mind, he applies strategies such as collage, estrangement and resignification: he contrasts images of tables, chairs and bookshelves with different wooden objects, he recycles and gives new meaning to old paper stage decorations, and wraps various elements in blankets, thus abstracting their objectuality. All this with the intention of constructing a symbolic universe which, in its quality of re-presentation, invites us to search for a more critical understanding of the conventions of this world.
Distancing himself, therefore, from stage design as a simple contextual element, and bringing the representation of the real world into the foreground, Duran proposes a setting in which the true protagonism lies in the objects that have been endowed with new meaning.
Centre d’Études Catalanes – Université Paris Sorbonne
Join our
