According to the theme of Château de l’Esparrou : ‘Arts of Intimacy’. I turn this theme into an attempt to interpret a feeling of ‘Intimacy’ which containing ‘Space and Time’. While ‘SPACE’ is a cause of Loneliness, ‘TIME’ is a cause of Impermanence. Both are two profound tragedies of the human condition.
Besides the natural beauty and traces of history of this place which gave me great inspiration, my work for this project, ‘The Space Between Us’, is also inspired by Figurative Art, abstract Art and Surrealism. It is a record of my research and investigation those mentioned feelings by studying relations between men, nature and philosophy which relate to our feelings of everyday life in a contemporary time. The obtained information is interpreted and presented from my perspective through drawings, paintings and collage that combine images and texts together. The ‘SPACE’ and ‘TIME’ are represented by the overlapping 2 books, every time the pages are turned, elements of the images would be changed with different details.
This opportunity to live and work outside of my usual environments, has provided me with time to reflect, research and envisage my work. During the residency, I have explored new locations, different cultures, languages and experimented with different materials which is an expansion of my documented artistic territory to surpass my own limits for the sake of future works.
I have explored my interest in ‘Book Art’ which have been as an expression of artistic language since the 19th century, and in the 1960s many artists began to regard them as artworks in themselves. Richard Kostelanetz, a famous art critic, used the terms antibook and nonbook to refer to contemporary artists’ books in his 1978 essay. This artistic practice was in keeping with the conceptual movements of the time as well as to demystify works of art as unique, one-off pieces.
“In addition, the sequence of movements involved in turning the pages of a book gave artists the opportunity to explore geometric and colour series, creating variations and combinations of geometric forms and colour palettes. Others developed numerical serie using mathematical calculations or musical notations inspired by the notion of time inherent to page turning. There were also more conceptual approaches, where artists experimented with distances and positions in space” (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. 2019. Sampler #3. Anti-books, retrieved 11st October 2019, from www.macba. cat/en/sampler-3-anti-books/1/exhibitions/expo)
I have explored new material made from grape. (There are plenty of grape around here. I have made grape juice for painting by myself). I have not put any other of chemical things in it, so it would fade away slowly. That can represent the subject of time and temporality.