CONTEMPORARY ART - EXHIBITIONS

The Loci of Painting


The Loobster room


Date
1994
Artist
Vicenç Viaplana




"I worked for years, enclosed in the studio, without exhibiting any artworks, trying to improve my technique. I felt the need to establish my own language, a solvent technique that would enable me to continue working without lapsing into pictorial anachronisms. The mid-nineties onwards were years when painting was placed under intense scrutiny, even repudiated. It was the right time for reflection. I had begun with the conceptual, working fundamentally on ideas, but I also understood that there were places that could only be reached through painting. In The Lobster Room, the observer looks, from a 45 degree angle, towards an empty space beneath a table. Chromatically, the painting is built with a range of greys reminiscent of a black and white photograph. You cannot detect any brushstroke nor gesture. In The Lobster Room, we are looking under the table. Likewise, under the paint. We try and see what is under the paint. The painting is not meant to say anything at all, there are no answers. We are faced with an empty, grey space, from where the creative drive occasionally, inexplicably, emerges. A lobster in an empty room". Vicenç Viaplana