JOSÉ MIGUEL PEREÑÍGUEZ.
THE OTHER: AN APPLIED ARTS EXHIBITION

Opening: Thursday, November 21 at 8 pm
Dates: November 22, 2013 - February 23, 2014
Session: Beyond Figura

If you sit down to read Lev Tolstoy's short novel Hadji Murat, you may be struck by the abundance of terms borrowed from different languages of the Caucasus region (Avar, Tartar, Persian, Turkish, etc.) that appear in the text and are not translated. Objects, belongings, clothing or characters: all of those words, taken together, sketch a rough picture of that region's material and human landscape. Yet the objectivity of this original vocabulary is diluted by the impossibility of forming a clear image of these foreign words in our minds. We read of concrete realities, designated by terms that are commonplace in their respective languages and yet remain a mystery, only hazily elucidated in the footnotes, to us.

This project aims to find a visual equivalent for each of those words, either by depicting the object they describe or by resorting to some kind of symbolic representation in cases where an exact equivalent is harder to find.

A little later, another group of works emerged that had the potential to serve as counterpoints to the task of reconstructing the foreign terms in Hadji Murat. These works were, for lack of a better description, commentaries in the form of sculpture-almost in the same vein as satirical cartoons-on the work of certain key figures in the history of modern architecture and design.

Thus, the "natural" formalization that overtakes things and people in the heart of a vernacular culture like the one Tolstoy describes could be presented as the polar opposite of this other moment in the history of art, still almost contemporary with our own, in which every object is already a premeditated, contrived creation born on the drawing board. Adolf Loos, along with Heinrich Tessenow and Peter Behrens, provided the inspiration for those sculptures, which offer a detached reflection on the interference between drawing and object, between craftsmanship and machinism.

This exhibition is about the other: about that which surpasses us in savagery or refinement. But it is also about nostalgia for the trade, the craft; it is about geometry as a tool for analysing and forcing reality into submission; and perhaps it is even about manual labour, precise and demanding in the extreme, as a way of accepting one's own destiny.