Pere Llobera
The painter and sculptor Pere Llobera has responded to the proposal to dialogue with the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya through his project Ethylic Suppuration of Stone that can be seen in the Room Educart until 3rd March 2019. After carrying out a research for the museum’s collection, the artist presents an installation about the idea of “small, medium and high intensity” failures, art outside the official history and those forgotten artists. In this post he explains the project in his own words.
Toilet
Today, Tuesday 6th November 2018, while I was setting up the exhibition Ethylic suppuration of stone, suddenly it became clear to me. No passerby (or ‘passapixant’), the one who stumbles upon the exhibition on the way to the toilets of the Oval room of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, will understand the slightest bit of what I offer them. Hey! I have seen it with my own eyes. People pee and not for romance. And even less for my romances.
What will happen with the sticky ratafia, flavoured with Catalan herbs that I have set in the Educart space is that very few people will study in depth the contents of this exhibition. I can’t be surprised; Sometimes, I myself get tired of this taboo.
But maybe that’s the thing; of offering much more than they ask for. Even offering those who do not ask for it and were simply on the way to the toilet.
There’s no art without conflict
To the people of the MNAC department of diffusion, I have informed them in previous communications, that this place where I have been assigned to place my artifacts and some other things of the collection seems to me something like an appendix; a small protuberance, apparently useless with respect to the enormous museum body of the building, but when inconveniently inflamed can cause a peritonitis and full of conflict, Educart. Obviously what will really happen is that the museum will win the bacterial war (there is no doubt) and that I will return to the angry melancholy that defines me.
Win-win
In the STAR magazine, which I have deposited in the room and that no one will flick through (now that I have said this it’s no use saying that you will do it), reside the texts of “NOSOTROS LOS MALDITOS” (We the damned ones) by Pau Maragall, under the pseudonym of Pau Malvido. The copies will probably be stolen, but if that is not the case and you get to read them, it won’t be necessary to explain anything else about this exhibition. A lot of conceptual things are summed up there.
The rest is basically a desire to be annoying: corrupting the luscious kindheartedness of the Pastorets with a cryptic offense to all the shields and threats / to scrutinize Catalan Christian democracy that has hurt culture so much here / to violate the monitors of school visits that cannot explain to the little ones why the deer of one of my paintings is licking mushrooms / and to match penances among people who kneel down for different reasons … Fortunately for the established order no one susceptible to offense will take the time necessary to do this reading of things and those who are able to invest this time will not be offended.
Win-win, as the English say.
Open with Enric Casasses
Enric Casasses is calling us to the inauguration of “The Suppuration” with a brief but highly interesting recital centered on the figure of his friend Pope (the one of the poster) and a bit about the idea of failure. I transcribe the shorter ones so as not to tire people (if you are not a poet’s fanatic, it is not the same to hear Casasses as to write him). Here it goes:
Information of eternal issues
The woman has opened it
the grill of the outcast
and opens her arms with passion
because she loves a scoundrel
and there is not a better man
Of the 9 poets
And Pope, the number one,
between the index finger and the thumb
he holds a raw egg yolk
surrounded by blows.
***
By the way! Enric says three things before starting:
- that the poem AHÏR was the first that Pope ever did (I didn’t know)
- that Pope read this poem aloud just after the word Borinot. So: AH!!!!!!
- that in his case (that of Casasses), when he was a kid he had the record of Pete Seger in the Carnegie Hall which I have put on the documentation table. And that the last track is one by Bob Dylan which is presented by a new and young promise of folk.
Cassasses makes a beeline to carrer Balmes 18, Barcelona, in search of a disc by Dylan and they say that they don’t have any; the shop assistant looks closely and when he’s almost turning to go he says: Wait! He goes to the secret part of the store and returns with a record from Minesota.
I wish now there were exams such as this one.
Related links
Pere Llobera. Ethylic Suppuration of Stone
Pere Llobera
