POST-sentence

If art is to be mean­ing­ful it has to say some­thing sig­nif­i­cant from the pri­vate or pub­lic world; one artist who does this is Barcelona’s Xavier G-Solis.

Hav­ing seen some pub­lic­ity for his up­com­ing ex­hi­bi­tions in Barcelona and Vi­lafranca del Penedes, it’s clear to me that in his work he’s skill­fully com­bin­ing pro­found state­ments with more in­ti­mate acts of ex­pres­sion. In other words (like me), he sees the role of an artist as being some­one who com­mu­ni­cates in im­ages where words alone don’t do the re­quired job.

What ap­peals to me most about his cre­ations is the pro-democ­racy and anti-au­thor­i­tar­ian sym­bols in the ex­hi­bi­tion, which has a title that is a play on words of “state”. Or maybe it’s more ac­cu­rate to also say “State”.

In a piece that could be con­tro­ver­sial to some, he uses shoes – his most pop­u­lar item of choice over his ca­reer – in this case al­ter­nat­ing red and yel­low es­padrilles pre­vi­ously worn by dancers at the Festa Major de Vi­lafranca.

These tra­di­tional Cata­lan shoes are shown with a mil­i­tary-style sword skew­er­ing through them. Their hang­ing down laces sug­gested run­ning blood and puss to me. The work is en­ti­tled “Feb­ru­ary 12, 2019”, the date when the pro-in­de­pen­dence po­lit­i­cal pris­on­ers’ trial began.

This is what has been termed as a post-sen­tence in­stal­la­tion, arranged along­side some en­grav­ings made with an open-cast­ing ma­chine on bare ground: a bru­tal and force­ful tech­nique that the artist hadn’t used since 2012, when the out­raged “In­dig­nats’’ oc­cu­pied the Cata­lan cap­i­tal’s most well known pub­lic square (as well as Xavier’s at­ten­tion.)

Next to this are two pieces en­ti­tled “Eu­rope”, in­clud­ing a bank safe that has a com­bi­na­tion num­ber lock for­got­ten years ago. Who knows what’s in­side. As well as the promise that vis­i­tors are going to have the op­por­tu­nity to ma­nip­u­late one of the ex­hibits, the artist has also been sched­uled to do some kind of per­for­mance in the gallery.

G-Solis, a for­mer lec­turer in phi­los­o­phy, told me: “If you want to un­der­stand my work, you may have to start by think­ing about the his­tory of the human, the his­tory of the power of man and how it began with the tech­nique of mak­ing fire and con­tin­ued with the ges­ture of get­ting on top of the world and other hu­mans: the pow­er­ful high classes began to wear skins under the feet or some kind of san­dals for cer­e­monies. Fi­nally, footwear was glob­alised as a sign of so­cial­i­sa­tion: re­pres­sion, dis­tance, sim­u­la­tion, psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­tec­tion, os­ten­ta­tion. All char­ac­ter­is­tic of the worst kinds of power.”

And that is ex­actly what I per­son­ally want from art, in any of its forms: sub­stance.

We are liv­ing in an age where, sadly, the writ­ten word is car­ry­ing less weight as an im­por­tant way to in­flu­ence minds and ac­tions. In­creas­ingly, vi­sual artis­tic ex­pres­sion is the pre­ferred means for a younger pub­lic to get their ideas, and in the case of video, also their in­for­ma­tion and in­spi­ra­tion.

In pri­vate art gal­leries in Cat­alo­nia, there are still legal ways to make our cho­sen points. If that be­comes dan­ger­ous or im­pos­si­ble in this Eu­ro­pean coun­try, then we are no longer liv­ing in a place that can claim to be a democ­racy.