This exhibition invites the gaze to abandon what is obvious, moving it beyond mental constraints. An invitation to our eyes to delve deeper into the skeletons and structures of the objects that surround us, which in one way or another, decontextualized and understood in material terms, have an influence on architectural creativity.
The team made up of the professional photographers Mònica Roselló (Tarragona, 1961) and Jordi Guillumet (Barcelona, 1953) presents an exhibition with two series dedicated to the relationship between objects and architecture, L’armari de l’arquitecte [The Architect’s Cabinet] (La Galeria) and Arquigrafies [Archigraphs] (Pou and Cavallerisses).
Mònica Roselló has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona, and did additional studies at the Elisava design school. She has been dedicated professionally to the field of photography since the 1980s. Jordi Guillumet, who was a member of the movement that revitalised the photography scene in the 80s, also studied at Elisava and has a degree in Photography from the University of Barcelona, where he has taught extensively.
L’armari de l’arquitecte
Objects and creativity. Everyday things that are accessible to the photographic gaze, together with architectural creativity.
Photographers Roselló and Guillumet play with objects by separating them from their functionality, in this way converting them into shapes able to give rise to the construction of functional structures.
Could a coffee-maker inspire the creation of a building, for example? Not if we are speaking of its functional dimension. Yet the thesis of these artists states that it is possible for this object, however bound to everyday circumstance and familiar to us, can become something that goes quite beyond such pragmatism.
How does this happen? By erasing the limits of the gaze, and of the functionality of things. Enlivening what is, in the end, the creative mechanism.
Artefacts portrayed with a certain romanticism, with the historical cyanotype process of copying plans, become artistic models once printed. The most pragmatic visage of what is depicted evades our awareness, and the images become artistic photographs. Suddenly, shapes, blotches and a variety of materials create an aura, spurring the awakening of architectural imagination.
As a complement to the photographs, as if by way of a magical trick, some of these objects are shown in the gallery (on loan from the collaborating architects). Perhaps they are not so much illusionist things or symbols as they are architectonic icons.
Have we ever stopped to wonder about the dualities matter/creativity and object/architecture?
Arquigrafíes
Arquigrafies is a series that consists of creating situations of consonance between features of visual communication and architecture. How do the artists Roselló and Guillumet construct their discourse in relation to the concept?
The starting point is the idea of shadows. They become the main axis around which the series revolves. Those artefacts we have already spoken of project shadows, and they in turn (seen as stains or smudges) inspire or recall the architectonic fact.
Future buildings, or already existing constructions, find a point of reference in the depersonalisation of illuminated objects. We are not so much interested in the object in itself but rather its projection, such as in the deconstruction of the object.
A contemporary platonic play of shadows? A dance of Chinese shadows, where objects work as hands and animal shapes are turned into architectural spaces?
Let’s play, then, like when we search for recognizable shapes in stains on the walls or blotches in the sky, staring at the clouds. Let us go beyond what surrounds us, crossing over the limits of what our own minds propose. If this is what we focus on, everything is influenced, everything related.