JESUS PALOMINO | CONVERTISSEUR DE PEURS / LA FONTAINE DE COURAGE

JESUS PALOMINO | CONVERTISSEUR DE PEURS / LA FONTAINE DE COURAGE

Room 1

Jesus Palomino

CONVERTISSEUR DE PEURS / LA FONTAINE DE COURAGE

EXHIBITION /
MAY 4 TO JUNE 17, 2006

Concerned with themes of history and the historical displacement of individual life, agency and responsibility in the political arena, for the last several years Spanish artist Jesus Palomino has assembled wildly fantastic machines. These creations, designed to serve an apparent array of functions, all, to one extent or another, circle around the notion of clearing, of purification. He has installed apparatuses to filter the negativity from history in which volumes on the Spanish Civil War and other carnages acted as the “input” to a system at the end of which a series of bottles, poignantly, waited to receive the poison. In Venezuela he exhibited a machine to produce civil rights, and, for a biennial in Serbia, he put together an elaborate system to purge the toxins poured into the Tamis River during the war years.

To underline the disproportionate relationship of scale between us, as lone human beings, and the powerful forces addressed by the work, Palomino builds his improbable technologies from the most humble of materials; bits of wire, cardboard, ordinary glass, plastic cast-offs.

Faced with the hallucinatory installations, the viewer is reminded of the insurmountability of the goals, of his or her implicit responsibility to act with whatever means are at hand, no matter how poor, and - by the works' wedding of emotional resonance to whimsy -- of the role the imagination plays in any possible solution. Because, happily, Palomino creates not just dreamlike machinery, but machinery for our dreams and, during his residency at Clark, he plans to produce a new apparatus, one to purge us of our fears and fill us with courage.

Jesus Palomino will also be conducting a collaborative sound art workshop entitled “Ambulatory Sound Project” during his residency at Clark.

Contact the gallery for details or to take part.

Texte Peter Dubé

Palomino's interest has always been related to human conditions, political criticism and representation of language. For many years, most of his works have been structured as site specific installations connected with local issues as well as with global stuggles. he believe that through art practice, one can experiment new possibilities of knowledge and understanding of being alive collectively. For this reason, developping art activities in a different environment and culture brings a lot of matters to work with, human and material. This is why his recent projects have dealt with a lot of and issues linked with ecological, economical and political problematics.

The Ambulatory Sound Project keeps this spirit.

Jesus Palomino is a visual artist based in Seville and Berlin. He holds a degree from the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha and has exhibited his work widely, most recently at Galería Helga de Alvear, Madrid and the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas