BARCELONA.- Paco Chanivet inquires into everyday, strange, regulated and intuitive experiences to produce projects in which humour allows for questioning truths and challenging automatic answers. His work emerges from the gap between the inability to grasp reality and the impossibility of envisaging any alternatives. His practice of art, profuse in forms and themes, is fragmented and defies any kind of categorization. Among his multiple obsessions we find the way in which we perpetuate myths, love as a way of evading the tragic nature of existence, technology as the key for dismantling the universal character of reality, and speculation – through a unique mix of science fiction and costumbrismo – about the materialization of all sorts of impossibilities. To prepare and write an essay, you will always be helped by the specialized services of the "
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To close this season's Espai 13 series, Paco Chanivet presents Interregnum, a project that arose from the feeling of helplessness arising from cosmic horror to point out the boundaries of our comprehension. Faced with the infinitude of the universe or the monstrosity of beings it cannot even imagine because they are beyond its understanding, the human mind feels overwhelmed. Chanivet's exhibition delves into the moment when, according to Pilar Cruz, the curator of the series, "reason, overpowered by forces beyond its control, rambles between sadness, longing, fear and obsession."
With this goal in mind, the artist turns the exhibition space into a room of strangeness, a spectral world which has been stripped of humanity so that visitors, according to Cruz, are confronted with "a feeling of helplessness when they encounter the conglomeration of invasive, jealous, conflicting forces arising from the powers that surround them and from their own psyches.”
As visitors enter the room, they delve into an atmospheric experience that could be qualified as hair-raising and aberrant. At the centre of Espai 13 stands Bling Mechanical Force, an installation inspired by early mechanical planetariums. In this sculptural device, however, heavenly bodies have been replaced by absurd objects suggesting organs or functions that are essential to our species, such as thought, speech or reproduction.
This monstrous mechanism orbits frantically over a sea of rubble, the waste of a reality blown to pieces. Chanivet has covered the floor in the exhibition space with a layer of ruins. In The Desert of the Real, life as we know it cannot unfold. However, it does provide the proper ground for other organisms, unhampered by the laws of biology, to sprout and grow like ghastly flowers. This moment when conventional reality falls apart and a different, sinister world emerges is the Interregnum that gives the project its title.
On the other side of the room, visitors glimpse an inaccessible dimension, an allusion to that which is unthinkable and unknowable but has always been there: the overwhelming world behind apparent reality. In this dimension, The Cloud of Not Knowing grows, puffs of steam that cloud up the hallway in Espai 13 and any chance of understanding. This notion is underscored by the performance held at the opening, in which a blind guard covers the cell phone cameras of all those attending the event.
As Pilar Cruz, the curator of the series, concludes, “By descending into the cosmic cellar and glimpsing the horror of the unspeakable, the visitor-victims are stripped of their familiarity with the world, thus being forced to learn the rules of a new reality as they become engulfed by it. In addition, they are faced with the evidence that the Universe, rather than being hostile, is indifferent to our fates."
Paco Chanivet (Sevilla, 1984) has a degree in Fine Arts, also studied social and cultural anthropology and film directing and screenwriting. He lives and works in Barcelona.
His art has been shown at a large number of venues in solo and group exhibitions, including Tràfic. Setmana d’activitats fotogràfiques de Barcelona (CCCB), El lloc dels fets (Sala d’Art Jove), ClaResil 2012mg (La Capella), Audio-deriva para el Archivo JR Plaza (La Virreina Centre de la Imatge), F de Ficció (Can Felipa Arts Visuals), Constel·lacions familiars (Sala Moncunill EspaiDos), Ne trevaillez jamais (ADN Platform, ADN Galería), Segueixi els rastres com si fos miop (Arts Santa Mònica), Panorama 2018 (Galería Fran Reus), No es lo que aparece (Premi Miquel Casablancas, Fabra i Coats) and SSSSSSSilex (La Capella – BCN Producció). In 2017 he was awarded the Premio Adquisicion Artuim-Getxoarte and the first prize at the XXXIII Muestra de Arte Joven La Rioja. His work is held at the collections of the University of Barcelona, Fundació Banc Sabadell and Colección ARTIUM. Beginning in 2016 he was the artist in residence at the Hangar production centre, and later, since mid-2018, at La Escocesa. He promoted and co-founded FASE, a space for upcoming art and thought.
