Born in 1958 in Barcelona (ES)
Lives and works in Barcelona (ES)
1995
dust on glass, latex
dimensions variables
Year of Purchase: 2007
Deploying a wide range of artistic practices, from painting, video, photography, to installation, Ignasi Aballi’s work raises issues related to language, representation, systems of construction of meaning, and the notion of time. Privileging hybrid methods of appropriation and manipulation of found objects and images, the artist explores the tension between what is manufactured and what is mechanical or resulting from a natural process, between the visible and the invisible, the material and the conceptual.
“To make Pols, I’m collecting dust. Then I spray the glass with a mixture of water and latex. Next I gently blow the sifted (only the finest) dust onto the glass.”
This work is above all a model for what it is: a surface sullied by the sputter of the pervasive grime of the world, jarring with the usually spotless interiors of the world of art. The coat of dust is at the same time revolting and natural, fragile and invasive, amorphous and malleable, abstract and material. Pols evokes a common fascination with the imprint of the passing time and slow deterioration through accumulation, reminding us that pure transparence is not something spontaneous but inevitably challenged by the natural course of things. A reference to Man Ray’s famous Dust Breeding (a 1920 photograph representing Duchamp’s Large Glass covered with a thick layer of dust), Aballi’s work makes palpable a certain misguided ideal of transparency: a visibility turning opaque, a hygiene tending to insalubrity, an isolation becoming invasion.
Carole Billy