NOTA DE PRENSA

GIRBENT

PICTURES: RECENT PAINTING

In the fifth show of his series of exhibitions PICTURES, Girbent unfolds a new discourse before the spectator…a subtle mythology that traverses his most recent works.

RECENT PAINTING —a title not devoid of irony— is a proposal that brings together painting and writing and that emerges as a broad reflection on the possibilities of painting in our time, in the 21st century…a reflection which Girbent raises based on an incursion (still another one) into one of the central themes of his aesthetic proposal: the subject of of the original and the copy.

Based on the principle of “The Identity of the Indiscernibles” by Leibniz and the Borgian formulation of the concept of the “hrönir”, Girbent argues that the copies do not exist, that everything is an original.

PAINTING II and PAINTING III —two Girbents to all intents and purposes— emerge as two unique plastic artworks of complex ontological status. Derived from two referents situated at opposite extremes of the hierarchy of excellence in art history, Girbent creates two relevant contemporary art works thereby opening up unfathomable interstices in the fossilized infrastructures from which we normally distribute hierarchies and values.

Moreover, this proposal stands as a shrewd analysis of art criticism, that is, of the literature associated to the critical commentary on painting. Girbent’s intention to make the review published by Castro in the Mexican newspaper REFORMA appear as real as possible is self-evident. Likewise, the artist aims to endow such text with a mythical status, to make it susceptible of being compared with other influential texts in the history of art (crucial texts such as Greenberg’s or Steinberg’s, that endorsed Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art…although we should not discard the possibility that the artist is hereby presenting us with an elaborate parody of such texts.)

In any case, the texts displayed on the walls of the gallery, serve as a framework that makes it possible to read both, a reproduction of a 17th century masterpiece and a copy of an anonymous work of doubtful quality, the very essence of bad painting, as contemporary art. Furthermore, with this exhibition Girbent seems to suggest that maybe the contemporary quality of the artwork lies precisely on the construction of this framework.