Manuel Salvat - Looking through
Since the late 1990s, Manuel Salvat's work has focused on the idea of the city: conceiving of the urban fabric as a proliferating organism, Salvat selects diverse architectural elements and presents them for our view. The resulting multilayered work offers the viewer numerous points of access.
Upon closer inspection, some of these indeterminate surfaces turn out to be specific places, “angles” or “corners”-chunks of rooms lifted directly out of their associated apartments. Photographed and enlarged on a scale of 1, the floors and walls of these corners make an incongruous eruption within the public arena of the museum, a sudden emergence of the private sphere. Salvat's Angles and Meubles-Immeubles-hybrid objects that are both buildings and the raw elements of furniture-help effect this scrambling of boundaries. Theirs is a sensitive, mental game of back-and-forth : from inside to outside, from private space to public space, and back again.
And sometimes, lingering in front of one of the buildings, one notices something happening: a vibration arises from within the dwellings, a soundtrack of rumbling subways and humming refrigerators. At another spot, something has been produced-the buildings have secreted substances, they have fabricated materials. It is as if the artist wants to reinforce the illusion that the objects he makes and arranges are in fact autonomous, as if he longs to believe they are inhabited by their own miniature life. Are we seeing the collective production of the building's inhabitants? Or is this the building's own energy?
Part of text by Angèle Assia, 2007 (translated by Ann O'Connor)
Manuel Salvat is also the founder of the REVECLUB, a community of dreamers, and a collection of dream stories.
documentsdartistes.org/artistes/salvat/repro.html
Useful info
The exhibition will take place from Friday 21 of March till Synday 23.
Opening hours: 7-10 pm.