Institution, museum, canon

Antonio Fernández Alvira confronts us with the process of regularization and standardization to which our gaze -and as a consequence, the understanding of our environment- has been constantly subjected. He questions this process of standardization that also acts on our ways of doing, in which all those cultural references built and fixed by modern institutions, such as the museum or the academy, strongly resonate. The museum, that space in which to exhibit sets of objects and information that reflect some aspect of human existence, has existed in the West since ancient times. In the Greek temples, cult objects or offerings were kept that from time to time were exhibited to the public so that they could contemplate and admire them. From here we can understand that the museum, historically, has tried to make accessible the collective heritage and the knowledge of the Nation -if we stand from our modernity-, as well as to consolidate the ideal of beauty through a selection of objects and ideas. As obvious as it may seem to us, all this is still problematic. It is important to understand and make visible that this "making accessible" is not neutral. The museum generates national and cultural narratives and views, reinforces a canon -that which is established by a series of norms-, a history that assumes its role as a subsequent cultural reference in an almost inescapable way. The German art historian Aby Warburg has already analyzed the weight of this visual and formal frame of reference that configures our relationship with the sensible world, with history, and with images. Opening the exhibition with a reduced version of the project Elements for a speech (2018), Antonio Fernández Alvira forces us to go beyond it. In this exercise, a desire to dispossess himself of this legacy is perceived, becoming increasingly interested in the formal components of his sculptural proposal from an approach that tends to the corporeal, in a more processual and situated way. body, form, process This new project, El fluir en lo fixed (2021), seeks to dilute the canon in a specific bodily experience. Part of the collection and accumulation of ornamental architectural elements found in the street and that no longer fulfill their original function - elements that have become undone or ruined - to later recompose them. These fragments, in their old arrangement, formed the skin of the architecture from which we read the spaces. Through a gesture of spatial and functional displacement, they are waiting to be resignified. Once collected and recomposed following a visceral, intuitive logic, Antonio Fernández Alvira makes a clay record of these elements. This record is then ripped out and carried into the body - into your body. The strappo technique reverberates in this starter, a technique that consists of separating the pictorial surface from a decorated wall to settle it on a new support, causing it to lose its original appearance in terms of color, but also in texture and shape. The clay record is modeled, handled with its weight and movement until it becomes a piece of greater organicity, generating new holes and nooks and crannies that connect the corporeal with the architectural, putting these two different scales in relation. By making a mold, a series of pieces of pigmented plaster are obtained, a humble material that, through a sanding process, gives it a stony, marble finish, similar to that of stucco. The pieces obtained after this process are fixed and arranged in a more organic way to everything that the artist had presented to date. I allow myself this detailed description of the process without fear of revealing the possible visual deception that resides in this proposal, since, in my opinion, this time Antonio's game is not going in that direction. architecture, space, perception After losing their shape, these fragments confront us with a new spatial reading in which the body and its movement are the basis of our relationship with architecture. The body acts as an element of connection with space, which is revealed as the main concern of the artist. Color acts as an essential element when it comes to contextualizing the proposal, where the gallery space becomes part of the piece: it is the frame of reference in which the dialogue that is established between the different elements that make up the exhibition takes place, the gallery space and the body of the visitors. I'm not talking about scenery, I'm talking about something more delicate, about what determines and conditions a situation of interrelation. We observe how some pieces are arranged in pairs, in dialogue, evidencing the space that is generated between two bodies and acting as a limit. The attention shifts here from the object to the cracks or fissures that the artist has been drawing by arranging his pieces, as a dot. For this exhibition, Antonio Fernández Alvira presents us with an entrance from which to go beyond the academic and the historical to later take us, in a very subtle way, to a more personal approach, where the formal and the material take on importance. He offers us a bodily dialogue with his proposal in which it is worth losing a few moments to observe the choreography generated by the bodies that approach the gallery. Text by Elena Blesa, Curator and Educator Photos by Roberto Ruiz