Salvador Cidrás
27 Sep 2008 - 11 Jan 2009
SALVADOR CIDRÁS
27 September 2008 - 11 January 2009
MUSAC to unveil 24 horas 10 minutos, site-specific installation by Salvador Cidrás
Title: 24 horas 10 minutos
Artist: Salvador Cidrás (Vigo, 1968)
Curator: Tania Pardo
Coordinator: Eneas Bernal
Venue: Hall 3
Dates: 27 September 2008 - 11 January 2009
The Castilla y León Museum of Contemporary Art is to host 24 horas 10 minutos [24 hours 10 minutes], a large site-specific installation of new works conceived and executed by artist Salvador Cidrás and produced by MUSAC. In 24 horas 10 minutos, Cidrás inquires into youth as a value, placing special emphasis on the world of adolescent males and the symbolic relationships they develop in their everyday environments. The artist reshapes the exhibition space, adapting urban items and practices in order to reconstruct teenage stereotypes and explore the narratives that interfere in the construction of their identity. Cidrás’ ad hoc project for MUSAC will come hand in hand with a book compiling his drawings and templates for the mural installation.
Salvador Cidrás (Vigo, 1968) made a name for himself in the mid 1990s with a series of sculptures and drawings that recorded the uppermost surface of nature. This work was later extended with a range of landscapes (some urban) executed in the form of wooden designs painted in vibrant colours and flat inks.
Since then, his work has been seen far beyond the reaches of his native Galicia, with solo exhibitions such as Nueve Tipos de Encuesta (Espacio UNO, Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid) or collaborative projects such as Bloody Nose/El prisionero Blanco (Main Gallery CGU, Los Angeles, California) alongside Vicente Blanco and international exhibitions, such as Collage, (Sparwasser HQ, Berlin) or Transplant-heart. Urban environmental sculpture Project”, (Santiago de Compostela – Helsinki). In all these projects, the artist delves into the relationships between design and architecture as a response to people’s everyday needs: the artificial vs. the natural, the art world vs. reality, as questions of social order that affect the individual and his environment.
Though certain elements of his vocabulary were present in some of his previous work, Cidrás is currently focusing on the reconstruction of alternative cultural trends, reflecting on certain forms of social behaviour through images, whose treatment and use are governed by a powerful experimental drive that leads to a profusion of formats.
24 horas 10 minutos
The exhibition, which takes the form of a mural installation, is the artists’ largest to date. His statement can be read as a succession of fragments, broken up yet self-contained narratives that reject a uniform discourse and must be appraised as a whole by the viewer, on the basis of his or her own experiences. 24 horas 10 minutos revolves around three main axes: a sound installation; a large mural installation and a room displaying eight large-format drawings and a video by the same title 24 horas 10 minutos.
The sound installation is made up of two mobile elements: on the one hand, a group of loudspeakers emitting de-contextualised concert sounds every four minutes, in reference to youth culture and its close bonds to music culture. On the opposite side, a large mirror rounds of the installation and raises the issue of the excessive visuality of teen cultures. A metaphor on the unreality of images and their reflection. In deed, the artist has often worked with the idea of appearances being implicit to reality itself.
The second axis is the large mural installation, presented as a silvery lining made out of largeformat posters that invade, structure and occupy the exhibition space but by the same token loose their inherent urban properties, whether as loci for collaborationism, as symbols of protest or as advertising surfaces. Alongside the slogan RESIT_REVEL_REVOLT, in line with the artist’s previous work (Consumiendo Juventud, 2005), the installation includes a number of printed templates drawn from a varied and contaminated range of iconic codes, including amateur photography, the internet, pop symbols, the artist’s own image archive, comics, etc. The viewer is thrust into an analysis of a body of teenage street symbols, consumed and used by young people oblivious to their ideological meaning.
Finally, in a third axis the artist inquires into the behaviours and stereotypes that shape adolescent male identities, in a room holding eight large format drawings and a video that gives the exhibition it title: 24 horas 10 minutos. In stark documentary language, and lasting a whole day (1440 minutes) plus ten more, the video tackles a teenager’s daily routine.
Alongside the video, the room holds 8 drawings the same size as the video screen, drawn in permanent marker on paper and filtered through gray Plexiglas cases, thus combining the projected image with the drawings. Once again, the drawings capture what Cidrás identifies as “the other”: images of our teenager in an awkwardly passive, robotic pose, mimicking the stereotypes and aspirations of a grown-up. Together, the drawings establish a unity that comes close to the aesthetics of printed material (posters, fanzines, magazines). In all these pieces, the colour black plays an important role as a graphic element reminiscent of silk screening. At first sight, Salvador Cidrás’ drawing may appear photographic, but closer inspection reveals the felt marker’s uneven trace on the paper.
While the video provides a quasi-documentary record of a teenager’s daily life in a large provincial town, the drawings delve into a more dreamlike and surreal universe as an escape route from reality. “I’m interested in the conflict that arises in a kid whose life revolves around getting hold of some money to have fun at the weekend without a clear-cut feeling of affection towards his surroundings,” explains Cirdás. In sum, a gaze bordering on the anthropological where the various contexts of the boy’s routine reconstruct a magnified identity.
“The images,” points out the artist, “capture moments in which the sitter’s attitude is sometimes of arrogance, of forced seductiveness or naivety. I find them all appealing as pictures of the myth of the eternal adolescence, of the value of youth (...) The way I treat and use the image is half way between abstract and figurative. That opposition also exists between the positive and negative image, between the natural and the artificial.”
24 horas 10 minutos. The book
The exhibition is supported by a book designed by ACTAR, which is to include copies of all the templates used for the installation and the eight drawings, as well as a conversation between Salvador Cidrás and Tania Pardo – exhibition curator- and a critical text by Shamin M. Momin, Branch Director and Curator, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA.
27 September 2008 - 11 January 2009
MUSAC to unveil 24 horas 10 minutos, site-specific installation by Salvador Cidrás
Title: 24 horas 10 minutos
Artist: Salvador Cidrás (Vigo, 1968)
Curator: Tania Pardo
Coordinator: Eneas Bernal
Venue: Hall 3
Dates: 27 September 2008 - 11 January 2009
The Castilla y León Museum of Contemporary Art is to host 24 horas 10 minutos [24 hours 10 minutes], a large site-specific installation of new works conceived and executed by artist Salvador Cidrás and produced by MUSAC. In 24 horas 10 minutos, Cidrás inquires into youth as a value, placing special emphasis on the world of adolescent males and the symbolic relationships they develop in their everyday environments. The artist reshapes the exhibition space, adapting urban items and practices in order to reconstruct teenage stereotypes and explore the narratives that interfere in the construction of their identity. Cidrás’ ad hoc project for MUSAC will come hand in hand with a book compiling his drawings and templates for the mural installation.
Salvador Cidrás (Vigo, 1968) made a name for himself in the mid 1990s with a series of sculptures and drawings that recorded the uppermost surface of nature. This work was later extended with a range of landscapes (some urban) executed in the form of wooden designs painted in vibrant colours and flat inks.
Since then, his work has been seen far beyond the reaches of his native Galicia, with solo exhibitions such as Nueve Tipos de Encuesta (Espacio UNO, Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid) or collaborative projects such as Bloody Nose/El prisionero Blanco (Main Gallery CGU, Los Angeles, California) alongside Vicente Blanco and international exhibitions, such as Collage, (Sparwasser HQ, Berlin) or Transplant-heart. Urban environmental sculpture Project”, (Santiago de Compostela – Helsinki). In all these projects, the artist delves into the relationships between design and architecture as a response to people’s everyday needs: the artificial vs. the natural, the art world vs. reality, as questions of social order that affect the individual and his environment.
Though certain elements of his vocabulary were present in some of his previous work, Cidrás is currently focusing on the reconstruction of alternative cultural trends, reflecting on certain forms of social behaviour through images, whose treatment and use are governed by a powerful experimental drive that leads to a profusion of formats.
24 horas 10 minutos
The exhibition, which takes the form of a mural installation, is the artists’ largest to date. His statement can be read as a succession of fragments, broken up yet self-contained narratives that reject a uniform discourse and must be appraised as a whole by the viewer, on the basis of his or her own experiences. 24 horas 10 minutos revolves around three main axes: a sound installation; a large mural installation and a room displaying eight large-format drawings and a video by the same title 24 horas 10 minutos.
The sound installation is made up of two mobile elements: on the one hand, a group of loudspeakers emitting de-contextualised concert sounds every four minutes, in reference to youth culture and its close bonds to music culture. On the opposite side, a large mirror rounds of the installation and raises the issue of the excessive visuality of teen cultures. A metaphor on the unreality of images and their reflection. In deed, the artist has often worked with the idea of appearances being implicit to reality itself.
The second axis is the large mural installation, presented as a silvery lining made out of largeformat posters that invade, structure and occupy the exhibition space but by the same token loose their inherent urban properties, whether as loci for collaborationism, as symbols of protest or as advertising surfaces. Alongside the slogan RESIT_REVEL_REVOLT, in line with the artist’s previous work (Consumiendo Juventud, 2005), the installation includes a number of printed templates drawn from a varied and contaminated range of iconic codes, including amateur photography, the internet, pop symbols, the artist’s own image archive, comics, etc. The viewer is thrust into an analysis of a body of teenage street symbols, consumed and used by young people oblivious to their ideological meaning.
Finally, in a third axis the artist inquires into the behaviours and stereotypes that shape adolescent male identities, in a room holding eight large format drawings and a video that gives the exhibition it title: 24 horas 10 minutos. In stark documentary language, and lasting a whole day (1440 minutes) plus ten more, the video tackles a teenager’s daily routine.
Alongside the video, the room holds 8 drawings the same size as the video screen, drawn in permanent marker on paper and filtered through gray Plexiglas cases, thus combining the projected image with the drawings. Once again, the drawings capture what Cidrás identifies as “the other”: images of our teenager in an awkwardly passive, robotic pose, mimicking the stereotypes and aspirations of a grown-up. Together, the drawings establish a unity that comes close to the aesthetics of printed material (posters, fanzines, magazines). In all these pieces, the colour black plays an important role as a graphic element reminiscent of silk screening. At first sight, Salvador Cidrás’ drawing may appear photographic, but closer inspection reveals the felt marker’s uneven trace on the paper.
While the video provides a quasi-documentary record of a teenager’s daily life in a large provincial town, the drawings delve into a more dreamlike and surreal universe as an escape route from reality. “I’m interested in the conflict that arises in a kid whose life revolves around getting hold of some money to have fun at the weekend without a clear-cut feeling of affection towards his surroundings,” explains Cirdás. In sum, a gaze bordering on the anthropological where the various contexts of the boy’s routine reconstruct a magnified identity.
“The images,” points out the artist, “capture moments in which the sitter’s attitude is sometimes of arrogance, of forced seductiveness or naivety. I find them all appealing as pictures of the myth of the eternal adolescence, of the value of youth (...) The way I treat and use the image is half way between abstract and figurative. That opposition also exists between the positive and negative image, between the natural and the artificial.”
24 horas 10 minutos. The book
The exhibition is supported by a book designed by ACTAR, which is to include copies of all the templates used for the installation and the eight drawings, as well as a conversation between Salvador Cidrás and Tania Pardo – exhibition curator- and a critical text by Shamin M. Momin, Branch Director and Curator, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA.