1+1=3
Gallery etHALL (Barcelona Gallery Weekend) · 26.09 - 30.10.2018
In his debut exhibition at etHALL Gallery, Marc Larré has worked on three different axes. The first axis structures the placement of the pieces in the exhibition and it is an intervention in the gallery’s space that could be defined as a “collapse”. During the 7 years of operation in the premises of the Joaquim Costa Street gallery, the exhibition space has been conditioned by the existence of a wall that divides the space into two. For this exhibition, the vertical plane of the wall ‘descended’ to occupy the horizontal plane of the floor. This fold or incision into space is a recurring theme in Marc Larré’s work: the conflict between verticality and horizontality and how it structures the inside and outside, the world and subjectivity. The gesture could be understood as a contact between two surfaces that previously remained separated by a right angle. To say it more poetically: the wall and the floor kiss each other.
The horizontal wall works as a platform to place what would be the second axis of this exhibition. This time the scale is reduced to a series of pieces made of clay. Mud is a material made of particles that come from the erosion of rocks by the forces of the wind, rain, and the changes in temperature. In mud there are remains of glaciers, volcanoes, water, and there are also human remains, forgotten practices, superstitions.
Mud brings to mind so many semantic fields that one could say that it encompasses the totality of what exists, or that the world could be summarized in a clay ball. Each one of the pieces is the result of a contact or collision between the surface of the clay and the cultural and material heritage of the city of Barcelona with its buildings, walls, and grounds. In a game of relations between the symbolic and the real, more or less iconic places collide, ‘bite the dust,’ volumes are loaded with physical virtuality.
The third axis of the exhibition includes pieces on paper that explore the question of the index already present in the clay pieces, but in this case it is brought to a state of paroxysm. The index is the finger, pressing every square centimeter of a paper surface until what is below appears engraved on its surface as it is. The scale this time is reduced to the level of the infra-mince (Duchamp), the imperceptible. The trace that has left the mark on the surface of the paper is barely perceptible. A mosaic of Pompeii covered with volcanic stone, a megalith on a disposable tablecloth, lichens merging with an industrially produced pattern, the smile of a human skull on a paper napkin.
The three axes are the skeleton, the flesh and the skin of this exhibition.
