Jaime Pitarch
24 Apr - 24 May 2008
JAIME PITARCH
Our current understanding of the world is to a great extent shaped by the means of information called mass media today. The idea that “information is a right” or that “information is a needed good” is deeply at odds with the fact that the channels which convey it, inserted into a liberalist economic fabric, submit it to a process of “spectacularisation” that sets it apart from its informative essence in order to manage a high level of competitiveness before the rest of information distributors.
Adding to this the fact that the different communication media are funded through the inclusion of advertising jingles or advertisements in their broadcasting spaces, we arrive at the informative and formative perverted condition of mass voyeurism: reality as a consumption product that shares its territory with the production of images having scarce critical content, intended for gratification or consumption.
Singularly, while this framework has led to a dictatorship of image, the image itself and its accompanying word have been devaluated.
In the face of this perverted devaluation of word and image, the artist Jaime Pitarch (Barcelona, 1963) intends to dispossess things of their image “so as to see whatever is left of them without it”. In this exhibition, Pitarch draws a critical and sometimes humorous line spanning from the moment in which the painter became an independent agent (a signature providing an added value to the work) up to our current period, when the proliferation of images has led us to the loss of contemplation, an essential prerequisite to understand painting.
Following this path, Pitarch shows us the front pages of newspapers whose photographs have been eliminated (“With the sweat of your forehead”), a series of jigsaw puzzles representing great historical paintings, but whose image has been blotted out through a laborious peeling-off process (Raphael’s School of Athens, Brueghel the Elder’s The Tower of Babel, etc.), three little pieces made by weaving pornographic magazines together, or a reproduction of one of the Prado Museum’s banners, enlarged and oil-painted.
Jaime Pitarch has had solo exhibitions at the galleries dels Ángels (Barcelona), Spencer Brownstone (New York), Mjellby Konstmuseum (Sweden) and in Fúcares Gallery (Madrid). He has had collective exhibitions at the Musée Art Contemporain (Lyon), the Musée D ́Art Contemporain (Nimes) and the Centre d ́art Santa Mónica (Barcelona).
He has recently been selected to take part in the seventh edition of Manifesta.
Our current understanding of the world is to a great extent shaped by the means of information called mass media today. The idea that “information is a right” or that “information is a needed good” is deeply at odds with the fact that the channels which convey it, inserted into a liberalist economic fabric, submit it to a process of “spectacularisation” that sets it apart from its informative essence in order to manage a high level of competitiveness before the rest of information distributors.
Adding to this the fact that the different communication media are funded through the inclusion of advertising jingles or advertisements in their broadcasting spaces, we arrive at the informative and formative perverted condition of mass voyeurism: reality as a consumption product that shares its territory with the production of images having scarce critical content, intended for gratification or consumption.
Singularly, while this framework has led to a dictatorship of image, the image itself and its accompanying word have been devaluated.
In the face of this perverted devaluation of word and image, the artist Jaime Pitarch (Barcelona, 1963) intends to dispossess things of their image “so as to see whatever is left of them without it”. In this exhibition, Pitarch draws a critical and sometimes humorous line spanning from the moment in which the painter became an independent agent (a signature providing an added value to the work) up to our current period, when the proliferation of images has led us to the loss of contemplation, an essential prerequisite to understand painting.
Following this path, Pitarch shows us the front pages of newspapers whose photographs have been eliminated (“With the sweat of your forehead”), a series of jigsaw puzzles representing great historical paintings, but whose image has been blotted out through a laborious peeling-off process (Raphael’s School of Athens, Brueghel the Elder’s The Tower of Babel, etc.), three little pieces made by weaving pornographic magazines together, or a reproduction of one of the Prado Museum’s banners, enlarged and oil-painted.
Jaime Pitarch has had solo exhibitions at the galleries dels Ángels (Barcelona), Spencer Brownstone (New York), Mjellby Konstmuseum (Sweden) and in Fúcares Gallery (Madrid). He has had collective exhibitions at the Musée Art Contemporain (Lyon), the Musée D ́Art Contemporain (Nimes) and the Centre d ́art Santa Mónica (Barcelona).
He has recently been selected to take part in the seventh edition of Manifesta.