Lluís Barba
My work is a reflection of society and a critique of the problems it generates. ‘Art is a privileged platform and those who we have access we have to tap…’ I single out the two speeds at which society progresses, the vertiginous imbalance in our world, opulence and poverty, culture and ignorance… and on the other hand I show the isolation, mass consumption, alienation and the daily loss of identity. I try to translate these concepts conceptually and formally.
The formal part of the fascination stems from the way our brain receives external afferents, since the image we receive through the retina becomes totally fragmented at the hypothalamus, where a virtual image is reconstructed conditioned by the evolutionary parameters from our species. Which leads me to contextualize elements of reality to place them in another, creating new realities.
Recovery of past masters, contemporary artists from different disciplines as Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Donald Judd, Sol-LeWitt, Cattelan, Miró, Matthew-Barney, Richter, Rothko, Vanessa-Beecorft… and also works by artists of the past that are no longer in ‘the art guidebook’ and are almost forgotten, for me it is a contrast antagonistic.
While the classics seek perfection from perfection, contemporaries seek perfection from imperfection. The classics define the work as artistic craftsmanship, and the contemporary mechanization and seriation socializes an important part of art.