CURRENT EXHIBITION
Pol Pintó. The gesture as an idea as a gesture
An essential part of contemporary works of art is the encounter and achievement of a gesture. A single gesture that is complete and that, when it is made, raises other questions beyond its own action, even beyond the surface on which it takes place. These gestures can no longer be isolated from the idea that involves thinking about them, nor from the art that accepts them as an intrinsic part of the works, understood as a part of symbolic immateriality. When one of them is proposed, a world and a framework are proposed: the first because it will link the work with broad references; the second because it will give it a differentiating feature within them. The formal repetition of the gesture will come after the meeting and its implementation. Each new attempt will repeat what is possible, but the distinctiveness provided by each slight repetition and its difference will be achieved, and this will allow us to continue to yearn for the exact repetition of the first gesture. As Giles Deleuze taught us, “we must distinguish repetition from generality”. The latter “expresses a point of view according to which one concept can be exchanged for another, replaced by another”, whereas “repetition as a behaviour and as a point of view concerns an unchangeable and irreplaceable singularity”. In this context, we will call a series a set of attempts that will perpetuate the same gesture, which in turn will compose a style of doing.
Throughout his short career, Pol Pintó (Barcelona, 1993) has repeated a gesture that always seeks to be the first and yet achieves certain behaviours of generality. The lines drawn on the walls of the urban space have been adapted to the coded space of the art gallery and have mutated their meaning, although not their meaning. Each line persists in its attempt to record a period that will remember its duration, but the eyes that will see it will be different or, if not, at least they will have a different weight and different aspirations in their gaze. When the artist paints the walls, he works with tracing cord or construction markers to mark each slight stroke and leave a trace of it. Speed is essential in public space, even if these lines are not hedonistic tags or collective political proclamations. For the space of the political is also the space of confrontation between what is said and what is thought, between what is said by some and what is thought (and said) by others; between what is allowed and what is forbidden. Inside the gallery, however, other uses of this technique are allowed, because the same gesture is received in a different way.
Not for nothing has the artist created a transitional space between the street and the gallery. In the part closest to the large window and the entrance door, but already inside Vangar, Pol has marked the two side walls with vertical lines that resemble a plot but are actually the records of time. Both walls converge in a curtain parallel to the window, formed by the ropes of the ruler used to carry out this and other earlier works. The objects that served as markers are now remnants, remnants and also a physical element, welcoming all the small gestures made with them. They are container and ink; hand and tool.
In this subtle work, every slight change implies a force. The titles suggest a search and a finding, but also confusion and a clear need to move forward in the midst of doubt. Several works made in 2020 bear the title Untitled, but in the same year and in the following years other titles appear that are more indicative, even explicit. Fuga and An action are direct examples: the first reproduces within a canvas a characteristic shape of urban space, a point of origin from which fan lines emerge. The second is just a gesture that spreads, spilling over the surface of the canvas, generally unprepared fabrics that receive the paint as if spilling a liquid. Similarly, Repetition is a declaration of intent. Other titles mark a code (L3 / 5.50) and a series of different works indicate a path. They are entitled Empty Landscape, in which the central part remains empty, unpainted, and the tabs appear tilted on their vertical sides. The edges of the supports (in this case, boards with a gesso base) receive an explosion of pigment launched with the pen, contaminating the rest but allowing the central part to be emptied. This uninhabited place, now abandoned, was, in the pictorial tradition, where the most important events took place, where the main figures were shown and where the most elaborate lights were created. It is the limits of the space of representation that create a tension between the outside and the inside; as transitional spaces between two ways of understanding the creative impulse: whether to see it as a public act or as an artistic gesture.
The paintings are silent records; we do not hear the string striking its surface, nor the rhythm of the beats that, when thrown continuously, produce a pulsation. We have to imagine this like someone who imagines a repeated gesture on the basis of the written mark. These pieces behave like scores of previous actions that we must read and interpret from the lines, from the understanding of the gestures that initiated them.
Álvaro de los Ángeles