2024

La Gralla, Granollers

After Hans Bellmer, George Grosz, Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn ,Edward Hopper, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Junceda, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, William Kentridge, Picasso, Egon Schiele, Joseph Beuys, Käthe Kollwitz, Ramon Casas, Klimt, Aubrey Beardsley, Arimany, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Winsor McCay, Ingres, Munch, Apel·les Mestres, André Masson, Max Ernst, Ives Tanguy, Josep Maria Madorell, Rafael Sanzio, John Currin, Jean Fouquet, Bruegel, Botticelli, Tintoretto, Jan Van Eyck, Valdés Leal, Goya, Keith Haring, Piranesi, Gustave Doré, Amador Garrell, Toulouse Lautrec, Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon, Raymond Pettibond, Enric Sió, Günter Brus, Dieter Roth, Otto Dix, Klimt.
What to draw?
Or why to do it?
Because the making of art isn’t merely a comparative fact.
You don’t need to carry the entire history of art in your head in order to make art. Although, all things considered, it could be a good thing, Or bad too.
A different thing is where the, let’s say, autonomous work is filed and classified. According to Duchamp, who started out in art doing comic and satyrical drawings for publications in the early twwentieth century, art could be classified as good, bad, indifferent, déjà vu, and unexperimented.
Thus, one tries to get the work to fit into the first category, or the last.
Working with care, even in the most delicate spot of the dung-heap, with the same sort of connection that exists between the head, the hand, and calligraphy, and may this connection save us from Alzheimer’s.
Pay attention, it’s time to switch off the T.V.

65.000.000.000 $
Let us consider worldwide art sales during the year 2023; not the activity, just the works of art sold worldwide during that period, which amounted to some 65 billion dollars.
Maybe half these sales were of contemporary art, around 32.5 billion dollars.
40% of this goes to the United States, 20% goes to the U.K., 20% goes to China, and the remaining 20% goes to the rest of the world.
Spain doesn’t reach 1%. And what about Catalonia?
I don´t know; 10% of Spain, maybe?
Should that be so, it comes to some 32.5 million, shared out between state-funded acquisitions, institutional purchases, museums, foundations, other entities, commercial galleries, private transactions, taxation and commissions.
You don’t need to be an expert in the field to deduce that financial perspectives in this professional sector are by no means optimistic.
“Café para todos” is a well-known phrase here, coffee for everyone; it has been applied by the Spanish state whenever it seemed appropriate, and thus it continues to be appropriate for contemporary affairs, inasmuch as it is the same coffee all round, because one single coffee is all there is, for everyone to get a share of; as that is something obviously unrealizable, it produces what Thomas Bernhard called erased artistic lives.
In Catalonia this is enacted when the catalogue of a museum such as MACBA contains 396 pieces by the same living artist, 100 by another, and over 50 purchases from a good number of other artists I had to look twice artists chosen by certain civil servants who set foot in the place, threw their dice, and in some cases, having seen the work, it must clearly have answered more to a concept of nourishment than of artistic merit.
In fact, those Catalonian artists who are or who have been relevant in contemporary art -i.e, who have been included in the Venice Biennale_ are not represented in this collection.
In spite of this, there is an INDIVIDUAL inner urge to construct, to display, and sometimes to explain what, generally speaking, we call art.

Halfway through the last century, after World War II, contemporary art took on a social and political role of considerable magnitude, see, among others, Joseph Beuys, it was prominent and influential in numerous decisions by corporations, governments, foundations, and influential bodies; indeed, art was considered essential, something closely associated with the progress of democratic systems.
Within the time frame from then up to our days, in our country, the powers that be have erased these considerations from view, reducing the question to the fulfilment of a purposefully under-supported program, favouring pseudo-journalistic projects of social vindication, matters of sexual identity, conducted self-help, infantile escapism, and delirious technological competition. Activities that might well belong in other departments of the administration, and which are agglutinated within the well-known fusion of Culture & Entertainment, with the recent absolutely unreal incorporation of Sport.
Thus, having cancelled its possible electoral influence, the procedures of contemporary art have been displaced institutionally towards what is already defined as the recreational society of total display, so well described years ago by Guy Debord, in his iconic book The Society of the Spectacle.
Paradoxically, or as a biological reaction to this amnesic environment, and sometimes drugged by influential systems of propagandistic communication, art continues to be made, sometimes in a clumsy and rudimentary way; a procedure entirely beyond the establishment’s control through which art is shown and received, thereby permitting the individual brain to break free of any constraints to show itself in a an ancestral and rebellious manner, in confrontation with the agglutinating systems of group awareness.
Art does not work as a conventional system of communication, art presents, it doesn’t prove, it sidesteps orthodox means of communication. And this can cause pleasure and fear beyond control.
And they know it, and they want it blunted.
We wish you a happy conclusion of this 1st of October celebration, while recalling what Jean Luc Godard said shortly before he put an end to his life, when he was asked how he envisaged the future of film making. He said he foresaw its existence, like Catalonia’s, full of difficulty.