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THEOREM 2022, CARLES CONGOST
VAT not included
Technique: Giclée print on dibond.
Ed 1/3+ 2 A:P
BOYS ON MEMPHIS
With a prolific and significant career in the field of video art and staged photography, Carles Congost (Olot, Girona, 1970) has established himself over almost three decades as an intergenerational artistic reference. His particular use of humour and irony, as well as his particular fondness for different sub-genres of mass culture are manifested through his theatricalized, exaggerated, baroque and often science fiction-like stagings, with which he questions social roles, the use of the media and the institution of art itself, without losing sight of the complex contemporary visual experience. The photographic series "Boys on Memphis" is the project that Congost has devised for the stand of the Galeria Horrach Moyà at ARCO Madrid 2022, giving rise to the artist's first solo show at this important fair in Madrid. Through four large-format photographs, the artist displays many of the themes that have shaped his visual and discursive universe to date, allowing us to easily establish links between these new works and some of his previous proposals. The four photographs in this series present us with a trio of models carrying out simple stagings inside a set whose aesthetics recall both the Memphis Group, an Italian architecture and industrial design collective that triumphed in the 1980s under the leadership of the Milanese Ettore Sottsass, and the more geometric side of Art Deco and Pop Art of the 1960s. All the architectural and ornamental elements of the set, as well as the costumes and props that appear in the photographs play an important symbolic role. For example, in "Mambo" (2022) a small basket installed in the central part of the image turns the colourful set into a basketball court that refers to a student sports competition; the same basket appears again in the photograph entitled "The Man From Utopia" (2022), which alludes to the album that the famous guitarist Frank Zappa published in 1983 and on whose cover he appears incarnated as RanXerox, a popular fantasy character created by the cartoonists Tanino Liberatone and Stefano Tamburini. In the photograph, a simple yellow triangle floating in front of the model's face gives the sporting scene an eerie science fiction component. In "Teorema" (2002), we see reproduced in a rather sui generis way one of the scenes from the film of the same name by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Its protagonist, an enigmatic young man played by the actor Terence Stamp, appears on several occasions with a copy of the complete works of the symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud in an identical edition. The attire worn by the model in the photograph, on the other hand, refers to the Paninari youth movement that emerged in Milan in the 1980s. The Paninari, with their habits and their way of dressing, were evidence of the progressive implantation of the American way of life in Italian and Mediterranean culture, a process that the Reagan administration was able to carry out thanks to the collaboration of the first private television channels in Italy. "Italodisco" (2022) continues this same idea by paying homage to the design of the vinyl record covers of this musical genre that took Europe by storm in the 1980s, crowding the shelves of music shops with its futuristic and romantic sound.
Unframed measurements: W 210 x H 150 cm
Framed measurements: W 217 x D 6 x H 157 cm
