ProjecteSD

PATRICIA DAUDER

PREVIEW: SEPTEMBER 28, 19:30 H
SEPTEMBER 25 – NOVEMBER 23

ProjecteSD starts the season with a solo show by Patricia Dauder. The exhibition presents one film and a few drawings, works of spatial, structural and chromatic compositions, fragmented views of invented or documented places, through which the artist reflects on three ideas: space, time and the materiality of the medium itself. According to the artist, “drawing is the medium that I use to conceive forms, structures that do not necessarily resemble reality, it constitutes a language of invention. Photography and the moving image, are media that I use to capture fragments of the outside world, tools for the observation and analysis of reality, to suplement a personal imagery”. This duality between invention and observation, already present in earlier works like Prensa, (2005) or Les Maliens (a Script), (2006), is still found in the new works now shown.
Les Maliens (A film), is a 10 minute colour super 16mm film shot on location in Mali (2007). The work is constructed almost as a sequence of slides, with long steady shots of urban and rural African landscapes, deprived purposely of any preconceived narrative, where images follow one another independently, abruptly, without any plot, chronology or time logic. The film shows a harsh environment under an essentialist look. It captures landscapes in a remote place, peripheral to any noticeable event, where any activity seems to take place in a different time dimension. The camera sees reality in a somewhat strange abstract way, far from any documentalistic approach, linking disperse fragments, with no intervention, without penetrating in what happens there, precisely selecting the moments when nothing occurs. Thus, time in the film is not approached through the performance of any action, but as the own passing of time itself, the physical real time spent in the place, that it is now perceived differently after being projected. Les Maliens (a film) can be read as a translation to another space, and also as a return to reality itself. Shot on film, the work acquires a quality that takes it close to experimental cinema, taking it into an area where it is not possible to discern any known reality, paradoxically an area of almost total fiction. The repetitive structure, constructed with almost symmetrical and extremely horizontal shots of open, void spaces of synthetic composition, relates the film to the drawings that complete the exhibition.
The new drawings presented by Patricia Dauder, are faint grids, fragile structures or overlapping coloured paper layers, that refer to images seen from certain physical distance. Unrecognisable aerial views, maps, spaces in the broader sense of the word. The physical space around the individual, the space we see and in which we move, but also the not visible one, of microscopic or telescopic structures, or the space that we invent, the mental space. None of the images presented in the drawings originate from any real model. In some cases they emerge from an ambiguous memory. In others, the source is a recurrent, many times seen image. Some drawings come from possible patterns of growing natural structures. Others are architectural remains, city plans, topographies or simple spatial orders that once on the space of the drawing itself acquire its own logic and evolve to detach from any real object.
Both the film and the drawings show the interest of Patricia Dauder for the physical world, and a strong organicity, aspects that have been recognised in her work since the beginning. The idea of fragmentation is also clearly present. Of dificult classification, deprived of explicit loud discourses, Patricia Dauder ́ s oeuvre, replaces the forms of reality by an active space that appeals the senses through subtle perception flows, in an attempt to favour a subtler view, a closer look that opposes the anonimity and homogeneity of some contemporary representation languages.