When Lines are Time

In the first show in the Fundació Joan Miró’s Espai 13 series When Lines are Time, Rubén Grilo abandons the usual conventions of exhibitions and presents a series of conceptual reflections concerning the time of art, or in other words, the actual production process in the field of art. Turning to industrial models for inspiration, he presents oblique perspectives with critical potential. Some of the core aspects that define Grilo’s project include the creation of three-dimensional models with human error and gestures embedded in them, the design of impossible products, and the questioning of the conceptual objectives of each element.

What happens when industrial objects, designed for targeted consumption, cease to be so? Or vice-versa: what happens when we observe the field of artistic production from the industrial perspective? These are some of the displacements that Grilo’s project for Espai 13 proposes.

Grilo reviews some basic elements of the artistic process and turns them into artworks or exhibition material, tracing this process back to its origins –the tools themselves– and following through to the end –the final presentation–. For example, at Espai 13 he presents a series of tubes of paint that he designed in collaboration with the company Kremer Pigments, with a special attribute: they never dry. In this work Grilo does not just create a product, he goes to the root of artistic activity and changes the codes, offering a different temporality by means of technique, and opening up a field of new artistic gestures based on the activation of this material: works that can never be considered complete, works that cannot be shipped, that permeate spaces and visitors, that provoke artistic accidents that can be difficult to control... Grilo does not just rethink artistic materials, he also turns his attention to elements such as the exhibition lighting and sound as part of his project.

The show is rounded off with several devices that invite reflection on temporality and process, such as metal sheets with abstract constructions that occupy the walls of Espai 13, and chocolate moulds generated using specific, individual blocks of chocolate, in a poetic reversal of the usual production process.

Rubén Grilo (Lugo, 1981) lives and works between London and Berlin. His work has been exhibited in solo shows at the Kunstverein Hildesheim (Hildesheim, 2014), Circa Projects (Newcastle, 2013), Wilfred Lenz (Rotterdam, 2012), MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo (Vigo, 2011), and Galeria Nogueras Blanchard (Barcelona, 2012). He has also participated in group exhibitions in museums and art centres such as La Capella (Barcelona, 2011), CSS BARD (New York, 2012), and La Panera (Lleida, 2007).

When Lines are Time is the Fundació Joan Miró’s Espai 13 exhibition series for the 2015-2016 season. This transversal project curated by Martí Manen (Barcelona, 1976) reflects on aspects related to temporality and production in artistic practices. The series, which consists of four exhibitions, of which one displaced, a symposium, and a publication, explores the links between the different stages of artistic creation: research, the development and formalisation of a project, production, and the presentation of the final work. Rubén Grilo, Sofia Hultén, El Palomar (Mariokissme and R. Marcos Mota), and Rosana Antolí are behind the artistic projects.