Acto I: La eterna adolescencia

29 sep 2023 > 21 abr 2024

Acto I: La eterna adolescencia

Álvaro Urbano

Álvaro Urbano

Still standing, the ruins of Gazmira re-emerge every morning, detached, perched above the small town below. Like a strange monument dedicated to something nobody no longer remembers. Whoever approaches it will find a structure halfway between a honeycomb and a molecule. Even today, one can still glimpse the zigzagging road along which trucks used to pass, like hardworking insects transporting cement and wood. The ultimate purpose of this road, once the construction works were finished, was to take tourists and visitors to the flamboyant never-finished hotel.The way up to this acropolis should be a ritual, as if it were some kind of carefully-planned tracking shot. Once you got to the top, from the roof terraces, from the swimming pool, from the rooms, you would end up completely controlling the entire fertile valley of banana plantations below. And thus, we would be able to bask in the self-satisfying glow of endless progress.

What we are visiting now is a specular Gazmira. It takes place in an imprecise time. Similar to a large part of Álvaro Urbano’s work, it is only a moment, just a fleeting moment yet one that is nevertheless too long. The disconcerting lapse of time in which, on waking up from a deep sleep, we don’t really know whether it is day or night. We don’t manage to know where the dim light is coming or going. Nor can we recognize the place which, while apparently familiar, seems completely new to us. It is a lumpy time, and it is precisely here, with our senses on alert but with our consciousness dulled, when Urbano dissects the architecture, not so much because he is fascinated by the form or by the project, but more to make us partake in desire as its driving motor. In his installations, at the intersection between sculpture, painting and film, different stories seem to overlap kaleidoscopically.

And so, we listen to the echo of something that could have been and of what should have happened. Here is also where each one of the plants is carefully chosen as a new narrative. The castor oil plants and poppies that grow along the edges of farms, along ditches, in the scant few square meters left around tool sheds, or outside the little gardens set aside by farms. Only there where nothing else can be produced. Those places not taken over by the unstoppable green blanket of banana plantations. When, all of a sudden, the enthusiasm dried up, the hotel stopped spreading over the top of Tenisca. In fact, this mountain is an extinct cone, an accumulation of volcanic slag violently thrown out during one of the many eruptions on the island. An accumulation of material that still today is being tirelessly devoured to create new malpaíses, but also to mix with the aggregates used to reinforce the concrete in Gazmira. An endless cycle of self-cannibalism and rebirth. An eternal spring, an eternal adolescence. (Gilberto González)

Álvaro Urbano (b. 1983, Madrid, SP) Álvaro Urbano’s work involves an archeology of desires and past intentions. By creating atmospheres that replicate specific spaces and architectural gestures, the artist explores the narratives that are embedded in these built bodies. Urbano borrows strategies from theater and filmmaking–such as lighting, sound and costumes–in order to explore new formats of immersiveness, his projects are often structured as scenes or sequenced chapters. The interweaving of different media is used to generate situations that approach liminal and oniric dimensions transforming the exhibition space into a vessel of phantasms and apparitions. These staged realities are inhabited by vegetal and animal elements, only from a close distance these entities reveal themselves as intricate organic simulations.

Functioning as active characters instead of passive props, they interact with the viewers within an established fictional setting, generating parallel stories derived from botanical sensitivities and the common ground of art history. Urbano uses the “what-if” as a narrative trigger for exploring the volitional underground that can be unearthed from these modernist and contemporary ruins, often verging into the hallucinatory realm. The exercise of re-creating and re-framing architecture becomes an intimate exploration of the subjectivity of other artists and the social context in which these spaces were considered as functional, innovative or condemned to oblivion. Figures such as Federico García Lorca, Luis Barragán, Eileen Gray and Oscar Wilde appear in these stagings as elusive figures enriched with fantasy and speculation. Mimicry is used by Urbano as a platform in which illusion derives in humorous transformation; parody and homage bloom in synchrony.

Urbano has presented his work in exhibitions and projects at TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Tenerife, SP; Bergen Assembly, NO; Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, US; La Casa Encendida, Madrid, SP; Art Basel Statements, Basel, CH, with ChertLüdde; Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, DE; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, DE; Boghossian Foundation, Brussels, BE; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, DE; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, DE; CAB, Brussels, BE; Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow, RU; PAC, Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, IT; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, DE; among others. Urbano’s work is part of Hamburger Bahnhof Collection, Berlin, DE; Collection Lafayette Anticipations – Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin, Paris, FR; TEA Tenerife, SP; TBA21, Madrid, SP; Collegium, Arévalo, SP; Colección Museo Jumex, Mexico City, MX; and Fonds régional d’art contemporain Bretagne, Rennes, FR.

Together with Petrit Halilaj (b. 1986, Kostërrc, XK), his partner and frequent artistic collaborator, Urbano received in 2014 the Villa Romana Fellowship. They attended The Artists and Architects-in-Residence at MAK, Los Angeles (2016/2017) and hold a joint professorship at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, FR. Urbano and Halilaj have presented their joint work at Ocean Space, Venice, IT; Bally Foundation, Lugano, CH; Frankfurter Kunstverein, DE; Palacio de Cristal, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, SP; Autostrada Biennale at the National Library, Prishtina, XK; the 17th Quadriennale di Roma, Rome, IT; the Biennale Gherdëina, in Ortisei, IT and S.A.L.T.S., Basel, CH. Upcoming projects include solo shows at SculptureCenter, New York, US (2024). Collaborative exhibitions with Petrit Halilaj will take place in Guggenheim, Bilbao, SP (2023); Sydney Biennial, Sydney, AU (2024); and Portikus, Frankfurt, DE (2025). Álvaro Urbano studied Interior Architecture at the ETSAM in Madrid, and Fine Arts at the Institut für Raumexperimente, Universität der Künste in Berlin; he lives and works between Berlin and Paris