AN ART COLLECTION MAKES THE COLLECTOR AN ARTIST
The collector as the composer of internal mystery
Throughout the period of avant-garde artmaking, we learnt how to read the total silence of art in relation to fields of knowledge as diverse as psychology and sociology, linguistics and philosophy and physics and economics. Even so, despite our analytic efforts, poetry and music are the fields that best capture art’s energy, because of their affinity with it. The collection of Josep Maria Civit, which with stylistic freedom lends continuity to the accelerated evolution of the system of visual representation, gathers and then unleashes a powerful energy that the personality and seriousness of the collector assist us in deciphering, quite beyond the systematic order of tendencies.
In the era of multiplied knowledge and open systems, the creator of communicative messages opens up paths and reworks them, taking languages to the receiver; superficiality and academicism are set aside; codes are transformed creatively while originality and the unusual are pursued; experimentation takes place in forms and materials; the creator of messages synthesises combinational and variable features; complexity is condensed in favour of the instant and the presence of the product, allowing the spectator to relate to the work. Working in a way that resembles that of the creator, the collector ends up furnishing his own secret emotion with the art of others. Only in its construction can it decipher the mystery that art itself hides, so as to never come to an end. Here is where art’s eternity and dynamic nature take precedent over its existence in history.
The Civit Collection is therefore the result of various paths of knowledge and research, and especially of construction.
The spectator as interpreter of the collector’s work
In the Civit Collection we perceive a harmony of vibrations achieved by the temptation of colour, as if we were dealing with musical notes on a score of free writing. Alongside this intense, abstract tonality, other more entertaining works act as driving forces, with their paradoxical, confrontational phrasing charged with fresh humour, verbal games constituting visual features that are at once demystifying and captivating. A free, totemic, soft sexuality describes a behaviour that is more radically aesthetic than dogmatic, in addition to the sensory enjoyment. The collector does not choose works of art to fill in a property registry; instead he sends them to a blank page for a symphony that will vary in intensity, according to the space art might inhabit in every new installation.
The way the works in the collection dialogue with each other responds to an art staging in which the works, having been chosen by a single collecting subject and distributed by him in every new installation, end up defining an organised compositional system made up of subjective itineraries and relational echoes of a shared system. In the end, then, it is the viewer who interprets the score, with its arbitrary rules. Without the viewer, therefore, this collection would not have a collector, since the collector’s function is to be a communicator.
Who knows if the presence of the young Economics student at the snobbish sessions at La Ricarda—the Gomis family summer home with its undulating roof in the middle of a seaside pine grove—were not the denotative seeds of the new art as an ongoing system of propagation and enamourment. At La Ricarda there were the Gomis’ friends from Club 49, Miró and Prats as well as Tàpies; it was the place where they held the most innovative sessions of contemporary music, with concerts by Mestres Quadreny, along with theatrical poetry sessions led by Joan Brossa.
Travel through art and suffer the limitations of beauty
Cartographies 1 began its path inside a rhythmic forest of works that were either clear or dark, low-lying or extremely tall, with a dry message displayed for the viewer: “Look, See, Perceive” (Muntadas). In Cartographies 2, in contrast, where “emerging” works from the 1980s and 1990s flourish, Civit has placed a sculpture by Bernardí Roig front and centre. It features a character with its head against the wall, carrying on his shoulders a load of colour fluorescent tubes. In this way, while in the former installation art was inviting, here art speaks to us of its uncomfortable or less imposing weight, of the difficulty of walking against the wall. Offering a new point of view, another piece of art functions as an icon. We refer to Baby Calf, by Franquelo Giner. With this piece, art speaks to the unpitying human perspective on the world, nature and animals.
From the sociability of knowledge and perception, to the effort and fatality of the aesthetic revolt. An intangible art of ideas, of the unintelligible, and of its sculptural and allegorical figuration, where an effort must be made. We hear Plato and Hegel, who invite us to set out walking while thinking; we have the condition of modern man as we seek to break through the walls of his alienated condition, his condemning sentence: to travel through the beauty of art.
The variation of forms in a circular thought
The history of humanity is the history of forms. The Civit Collection is an example of the persistence of questions on the human condition, while also addressing our optimistic liberation in the conquest of unseen expressive forms through art. Forms and materials. From paint on canvas (David Austen) to a golden phallus on polyester (Susy Gómez); from the ceramics to a rubber vase (Santi Moix); from the continuity of the monochrome (Miquel Mont) to the values of concrete signs (John Nixon); from the decontextualization of words (Chingsum Jessye Luk) to the recycling of words that have been abandoned (Carlos Pazos); from the sculptural group of coloured lipstick (Ana Laura Aláez) to the insistent brushstrokes of a movement in reflexive transit, interior and urban (Xano Armenter); from large format analogic photography, coloured by hand (Jesús Madriñán) to photography as the support of a poem object (Chema Madoz); from a “manipulated” table football game, with the meditating players in search of the absurd (Rafael G. Bianchi) to a wall of earthen fragments, classified as brushstrokes (Carmen Calvo), and so on. Like this there are other investigations and culminations of tangible, visual space, attentive to the evolution of techniques, materials and messages. Photography itself, for example, has gone from the genre of the portrait to the absence of the face and the relationship of the linguistic portrait with objects of temporary, fetish value (Carina Linge). A rebellion against images, where Art is the persistence of memory, as the title of the work by Rafael Agredano reads, also contributed to a revolt against the forms of language (Ocampo), giving greater value to popular idioms. Art reflects and perceives, and art also speaks, so that art and the viewer might weep into the weeping mirror (J. Perianes).
A través de las nubes, a magnificent work by Chema Alvargonzález, serves to conclude a generation’s aspiration to travel, in a worldwide process of globalisation, and to the internal refuge of an intra-territorial lyrical aspiration. Inside a suitcase serving as a light box, there is an aery snapshot of clouds in the sky, replicated by a mirror effect, while around this pure air of light an electric train line cuts through it along an elevated ring, a miniature train on a continuous loop. Such a beautiful aspiration: the quiet movement of the wings of symbolism has now become the perpetual movement of the dreaming traveller in a space alive with clouds and desirous dreams of eternity in revived innocence.
Art without artists or collectors?
The paradox of the communicational artistic system is that art, despite being a radically human creation, gets rid of its finality to be solely expression or communication or transformation, and is above all life in form, and in this way be present in the life of whoever waits for it and learns of it. The collector creates communities of forms. The Civit Collection emerges from the limits of signification and biography in the form of freedom and beauty.
Opening up form to move through art from the visible to the non-visible
One of the major works in the Civit Collection is surely one of the most enigmatic, in the tradition of rupture and innovation in the very heart of non-visible memory. We refer to Portal amb catifa, by Perejaume. A red mat climbs from the ground up the wall, where it is framed in glass, with a strip of brass on the top. It is a pure action of form. The object of a non-natural floor we walk upon is converted through its bidimensional, frontal form into an autonomous work of art. Nothing is represented. The meaning becomes the spatial petrification of the verb transit. Stopping the movement and converting it into space. Space, thanks to the title, is a doorway. Various layers of meaning multiply the closed meaning of art. We are dealing with a pure form of the limits of art, a monochromy.
The red colour of life and nobility, a chromatic vowel that takes us to Mont-roig, to the old church that has now been desacralized. On the high altar we have seen the work of art supplanting the cross that once united terrestrial and divine domains in Christian dogma. Art takes the place of one of the monotheistic religions. The red in the place name Mont-roig [Red-Mountain] refers us to Joan Miró, to the site of his explorations, here converted into an ultra-site that let us capture what is universal. We are in silence, far from the noise. A silence of silenced words in the telluric rhetoric of the visual, where abstraction and figuration, legend and quietness, are made concrete in the illuminated access way towards the non-visible.
Vicenç Altaió
(1) “Ever since the 1950s, milk cows confined in small spaces have been drawn with forced smiles, featuring friendly colours in pastoral fields. This has also been done with pigs, chickens and other farm animals, with an infantilised image inoculated by means of campaigns, films and series focused on catching the eye of the most vulnerable. What better than to be convinced by those in authority? The work entitled Baby Calf is in the end a reflection of this psychological process for the mental and emotional disconnection of our experience. An indicator of the perilous cyclical process where beliefs determine our behaviour and behaviour reinforces our beliefs” (Manuel Franquelo Giner).