2001 – Surplus

Surplus

An exhibition of works by five Spanish artists curated by Jorge Bravo and Manuel Saiz.

Centro Cultural de España en Lima
December 11th 2001-31st January 2002
11-Diciembre-2001/31-Enero-2002

Artists in the show:

Luis Bisbe
Juande Jarillo
Mireya Masó
Ester Partegàs
Francesc Ruiz

Surplus

Surplus is profit, an excess earned by a work. Once the necessities of representation are covered, the elements that make up the works, physical materials or conceptual devices, continue to produce meaning through an inertial impulse. The additional wealth thus generated is the constitutional complement of the work of art. The autonomy with which this production, freed from the obligations of necessity, is confronted, is what makes the works of art unpredictable and brings them to the brink of disaster.

The works selected represent objects, situations and images that belong to the realm of everyday experience and that, with a slight change, can be taken to a different, distinct place of perception. This is already a classic theme in contemporary art, but the works presented here belong to a direct way of understanding artistic work in which the problem of reality-fiction doesn't arise: each of these works represents an 'increment of reality'.

The works overdub reality (also in the sense of cinematic overdubbing) in order to contemplate it in another linguistic universe. The sounds, the projected images and the printed images are doubled, they overlap their references, but the superficial element that they constitute is found in another dimension. It is this interruption of the strict sense of representation that creates the addition/surplus and not the redundant, necessary function.

We would say that this rupture is produced in the feedback of reality and its representations, and these works, as finely tuned devices, have to close the loop that makes the mechanism work endlessly, and it is here that the crisis of one dimension throws us into another.