spanish pavilion Ignasi Aballí
Born in Barcelona in 1958, Ignasi Aballí studied fine art and began a career as a painter. His discovery of Marcel Duchamp and conceptual art engaged his work in a process of dematerialisation that continues to this day. He is undoubtedly the most important conceptual artist of his generation in Spain. The young artist was influenced by the Duchampian notion of “inframince,” the visual poetry of the Catalan artist Joan Brossa and the works of On Kawara and Lawrence Weiner. The stylistic means of conceptual art—if they can be called that—are present in almost all of his pieces: methods of perception, serialisation, enumeration, lists, inventories and indexes, the repetition of banal or standardised elements. But Aballí sometimes goes further and proposes other themes, such as the self-destruction of his works, the limits of his understanding, waste, invisibility, the void, the difference between experience and information, the relationships between photography and film.
In the 1990s, he began making “paintings” with sunbeams ( Lumière, 1993), where the light suggested the presence of the frame. For the Malgastar series [Waste, 2000], he bought cans of industrial paint that he simply let dry: the passage of time led to deterioration or even disappearance, as in Duchamp’s ready-made malheureux, which consisted of a book exposed to the elements on a balcony, at the mercy of the wind and the rain. Aballí’s fascination with emptiness and disappearance is also visible in another of his works, where the idea of the presence of the paintings is revealed only by the trace they left on the wall from which they were removed. A very real trace appears in Personas (2006), where the artist asked visitors to press the soles of their shoes onto the white wall of the Serralves Foundation in Porto.
Other works mobilise language and concepts such as visibility/invisibility. For example, in Entre líneas (2009-2011), where sentences are cut so that the viewer cannot read them: only the white space between the lines is visible.The reader is therefore active, but also disconcerted or simply annoyed. Aballí uses language in multiple lists of names and numbers: general lists of durations, sums of money, undefined pronouns, percentages. The numerical quantities are sometimes grouped into categories: “injured,” “dead,” or “missing.”
Like Duchamp, who admired the posture of sitting idly by, Aballí presents himself as an artist of the immaterial and of the “there is nothing to see here”; like his predecessor, however, he strongly insists on the physical realisation of works, chooses his materials with absolute precision, and his works are always presented with care.
For the Venice Biennale, Aballí has designed a piece called Corrección, which “corrects” the space of the Spanish pavilion. The artist discovered that it was not in the alignment with its neighbours; he therefore came up with the idea of building a 1:1 reproduction of the building inside the existing one, but rotated by 10 degrees compared to the original, thereby defining narrow spaces and difficult or absurd areas of circulation. The alignment with the Belgian and Dutch pavilions also suggests a political reading. Franco’s dictatorship broke Spain’s alignment with the Western democracies for nearly 40 years. Even today, the country continues to “correct” its structural democratic deficit.
Alongside this intervention, Aballí will produce a series of artist’s books which the Biennale visitor will hopefully be able to consult and acquire.