Exhibitions
Boîte en valise (mutant) by Carlos Pazos
Few – or very few – are the occasions we have to enjoy nature and art, and few are the opportunities in which our gaze approaches that of the artist in a gesture of eternal complicity. And this is precisely what the artist Carlos Pazos (Barcelona, 1949) proposes to us – and more than achieves.
In the municipality of Argentona, in Mas Cabanyes, Portátil is being displayed, a kind of mobile museum that embraces a good part of the career of this unique creator who, at the beginning of the 2000s, knew how to anticipate the storage difficulties that every artist faces. Because, tell me clearly, the fragility of the art market, that is, a practically non-existent collecting and an oppressive patronage law, have not allowed our creators to take off and take their rightful place, on the contrary, it has inevitably led them to problems that are impossible to redirect in the current precarious scenario. And it is precisely in these spaces of heterogeneous creativity where we should focus our attention, because they are precisely these deposits of memory and contemporary writing, where the creativity of a system accumulates that, despite the will of many, is not capable of taking off.
Faced with this bleak reality, our artist formulates a mobile exhibition system that avoids the constricted structure of the museum. Thus, as if it were one of those Pedagogical Missions promoted by the Government of the Second Republic, Pazos begins in 2004, an itinerant project in which he pours, in equal parts, illusion and resilience; a desire for permanence and continuity with those who will precede him, and strength and rebellion towards an art system driven by immediacy and oblivion.
With Portátil, the artist of universal dimension, eccentric and expert at swimming against the current, displays a set of barracks -nine in particular-, like those found in the construction and which have their base camp in the Zedis factory in Lliçà de Munt, owned by a childhood friend who, together with his son, support and encourage him.
Carlos Pazos - Portable
Thus, despite the difficulties and, probably thanks to them, Pazos and his life partner, Montserrat Cuchillo, established the PazosCuchillo de Pazos Foundation, an entity that aims to preserve and project the work of this unique and unclassifiable creator through two headquarters: “Mi Path os Doy”, which has two premises in the parish of Trasanquelos in the province of A Coruña, and the “Portátil” headquarters with a nomadic vocation. However, the visionary project that is now landing in Argentona and that can be visited with prior reservation on the Foundation's website, becomes, despite the difficulties of the council - they confuse the artistic installation with an urban development project on a rural estate - an opportunity to enter a universe “constructed” in a way, of found objects, collages, drawings, texts, music and poetry, a poetry that is revealed to us, however, lyrical and poignant at the same time.
For all this, Borja-Villel, who did the honors of the presentation act, explained that the proposal followed the same conceptualization proposed in No me digas nada, the exhibition that he himself curated in 2007 at the Macba and the Reina Sofía, a mixture between thematic and chronological areas that are also agreed upon, a series of chromatic ranges that the artist approaches.
Carlos Pazos has built a “Boîte en valise”, a constantly changing portable container of works that expresses the emancipatory and rebellious nature that has also made him the recipient of the most significant awards. Portátil deserves an infinite journey.
