Enumerations
24 Jan - 05 Apr 2015
ENUMERATIONS
24 January - 5 April 2015
Curatorship: Manuel Olveira
Coordination: Carlos Ordás
Very often, and even more so at critical moments, reality is so overwhelming that it leaves little room for optimism. Many artists, aware of the difficulties of their time and determined to avoid indifference before all the events going on around them, commit themselves to the various conflicts currently besieging the world and use their works to make a record of the most violent and pessimistic aspects of human condition. Although, as contemporaries, we suffer and pay more attention to what’s happening in the conflictive and tense reality of today, the phenomenon of criticism of the state of affairs and the portrayal of the darkest, deepest Spain—the ‘España negra’—are not at all new in our history.
It is in this tradition that we can place Luis Melón’s (León, 1974) latest production. It is a series bearing the title Enumeraciones [Enumerations] that, exactly as its title indicates, consist in a series of performative paintings which draw on the most shameful statistics produced by the present society, from the people who die when trying to cross the Strait of Gibraltar to those being evicted from their homes. Enumeraciones is born out of the artist’s interest in understanding the way society collects negative data and then handles or rewrites so that the emotional or traumatic charge they may generate is cushioned. With this premise in mind, the artist attempts to explore and redefine the meta-language used in statistics dealing with subjects related to the darkest problems and the taboos of our society.
24 January - 5 April 2015
Curatorship: Manuel Olveira
Coordination: Carlos Ordás
Very often, and even more so at critical moments, reality is so overwhelming that it leaves little room for optimism. Many artists, aware of the difficulties of their time and determined to avoid indifference before all the events going on around them, commit themselves to the various conflicts currently besieging the world and use their works to make a record of the most violent and pessimistic aspects of human condition. Although, as contemporaries, we suffer and pay more attention to what’s happening in the conflictive and tense reality of today, the phenomenon of criticism of the state of affairs and the portrayal of the darkest, deepest Spain—the ‘España negra’—are not at all new in our history.
It is in this tradition that we can place Luis Melón’s (León, 1974) latest production. It is a series bearing the title Enumeraciones [Enumerations] that, exactly as its title indicates, consist in a series of performative paintings which draw on the most shameful statistics produced by the present society, from the people who die when trying to cross the Strait of Gibraltar to those being evicted from their homes. Enumeraciones is born out of the artist’s interest in understanding the way society collects negative data and then handles or rewrites so that the emotional or traumatic charge they may generate is cushioned. With this premise in mind, the artist attempts to explore and redefine the meta-language used in statistics dealing with subjects related to the darkest problems and the taboos of our society.