Luis Adelantado Valencia is pleased to present the first exhibition in the gallery of the artist Carlos Fernández-Pello under the title Elige todo, an exhibition about the genre of the work of art and how the battle for its definition, as rare as it may be, ends surrendering to the logic of the brand system.
For more than ten years, Fernández-Pello’s practice has been interested
in the secret life of the artworks. His line of work oscillates between the useful, the design object, the useless, youtube, contemplation, the rest of the work, painting, images for Vevo or teaching. As if they were entities with their own agency, he is interested in thinking about what a work does when it is stored, when it breaks, when it wears out or when time passes and it gets old. When it is not exposed. Through a kind of auto-ethnography in which his own history converges with the angular times of things, Fernández-Pello accumulates a formal curriculum of his works, seeing how they change, how they regress, how they dress into other things, how a painting disguises itself as sculpture or how a t-shirt becomes a painting, redefining not only what they are but questioning the very concept of being something.
in the secret life of the artworks. His line of work oscillates between the useful, the design object, the useless, youtube, contemplation, the rest of the work, painting, images for Vevo or teaching. As if they were entities with their own agency, he is interested in thinking about what a work does when it is stored, when it breaks, when it wears out or when time passes and it gets old. When it is not exposed. Through a kind of auto-ethnography in which his own history converges with the angular times of things, Fernández-Pello accumulates a formal curriculum of his works, seeing how they change, how they regress, how they dress into other things, how a painting disguises itself as sculpture or how a t-shirt becomes a painting, redefining not only what they are but questioning the very concept of being something.
Along these lines, Nietzsche proclaimed in his book Beyond Good and Evil that “everything profound loves the mask or the disguise”. Behind this provocation lay the classical idea that there is an original truth of things, hidden behind a multitude of masks. But for a long time now the search for that truth was postulated as the last of the masks; the last of the fictions; the last of the brands that we can buy. What if there was no truth? What if it was just a trademark?
The tricky objective of a retrospective would also be that: to put the entire work in the same place with the intention of unraveling “the truth” in the background; reveal what is the rhythm and result of an entire trajectory. Nothing is further from the intention of this exhibition. There is nothing true here. On the contrary, the exhibition imagines a fantastic cultural system in which the poets, the artists, abandoned the novelty and began to copy without remedy. The idea of a delusional society dedicated to repeating entire decades of its local and foreign history; obsessed with the ecology of repeating artistic movements, repainting each one of her paintings; re-shoot each of his films; rewrite each word of their texts, restart each of their wars, retouch each note of their songs. A story that does not move but occupies a space.
A work of art that chooses, at the same instant, to be all works of art.