GUILLERMO
PANEQUE. REPENTANCE
Opening: April
8, 2014, at 20:00 h.
Date: April 9 - June 22 2014
Place: South Cloister
Exhibition Session: Beyond Figura
Traditionally, certain pictures have spontaneously revealed
secrets hidden beneath the surface, evidence of what are known as
pentimenti-literally, "repentances"-which have always provided
valuable insights into the process of creating a painting. In another
field, writers like Octavio Paz, Neruda and Sábato used successive
editions to make changes and corrections, and occasionally even
to include earlier versions of their works. This pattern of conduct
poses interesting questions about the creative process: does it
end when the book is finished, or can it continue over the years
and find expression in subsequent editions?
My work has never been productive in isolation;
it only acquires meaning or interest through constant dialogue with
other works, contexts and stories. It functions like a palimpsest
that retains the traces of an earlier work while also offering a
new composition, hovering between inescapable repetition and speculation
about what has been omitted. My anthropological curiosity usually
drives me to maintain a fragmented vision throughout the process,
a vision frozen in time and open to the reactivation of memory through
imagination and reinterpretation.
This exhibition project should be viewed as
a preliminary, inconclusive effort that attempts to Challenger the
certainty of the "retrospective" as an event, from promotion to
installation. The STA GING of a "retrospective" show is the central
concept around which the project is organized, seizing this invitation
to exhibit at the CAAC as an opportunity to draw connections between
disparate pieces and the local context, a way of re-articulating
works from the past and other new creations devised especially for
the occasion. Finished works can produce "non-existent works"...
The objects and pieces, which are usually an end in themselves,
are on this occasion the means to an end.
Divided into two acts, the exhibition
establishes contact between two separate worlds: two different contexts
and two paths. The first part of the show, with no chronological
or linear structure, focuses on a web that operates as a series
of intersections and overlaps of works and techniques from different
periods, exploring from a contemporary perspective the classic idea
of the memento mori -a symbol of earthly transience- as well
as the nature and merits of the act of creating an artistic object.
The second part of the exhibition features
two video projections and other pieces in dialogue with paintings,
drawings and objects by Sevillian artist Miguel Pérez Aguilera (1915-2004),
grand master of the local avant-garde scene. Rather than records
of reality, the videos are actually different types of performances
of reality which, like the display material of Pérez Aguilera's
works and objects, take whatever bits and pieces of reality are
at hand and attempt to weave them into fictions.
This second story may complement the one we
have already seen, or it may be a reformulation of the first part,
circling around the logic of mythology. It might also be a visionary
take on the preceding part, or perhaps the first act will be a commentary
on the second. A shameless aspiration for the poetic: one World
trying to adjust to another...
Guillermo Paneque