Walter & The Spanish Baroque Gang in The New Golden Age (La mala pintura), 2008, 81 x 135 cm, edition of 7 + p.d.a.

Artericambi Artericambi via A. Cesari 10 37131 Verona Italy (city map) Send E-mail tel +39 (0)45 - 52 90 35 www.artericambi.org

A taste for the eclectic and the overloaded, a preference for grotesque fantasy mixed with splatter, a passion for remixing all past and present mythologies, but always profusely referring to cultural archives and directly to the world of the History of Art: these are the characteristics of Carles Congost’s style . Born in 1970 in Olot, Gerona, Catalonia, he’s considered one of today’s most ironical and visionary video artists.
The video he has realized for this exhibition whose title is “ La Mala Pintura”, presents a story that doesn’t have a coherent plot but in fact winds through unintelligible meanders where the world becomes mystery and prodigy. The events unfold without interruption between space and time , from earth to hell, from a sinister guardian to three geniuses of the “ Siglo de Oro” such as Murillo, Velázquez and Zurbarán : they are three ghosts coming from the past, not to alarm with their pictures the look of the time being , but to become dull fans of all that is tradition and conservatism , and moreover, to plot against the new media , especially the technological ones, with their light and transparent images, their concentration of visible and invisible.
All kinds of reality mix up like in the detective story by Brian Singer “The usual suspects”, where at the end the whole plot turns out to be the projection of the main character’s lies and good and evil exchange roles.
In “La Mala Pintura” the young man is using MySpace in order to catch and erase the suspected murderer on his display. This is to say that all is “Hyper- fiction “ : what is seen has never existed , not even as a fiction. The artist himself refers to the use of extreme “theatricality” . He writes: -“Every sequence has a different formal solution according to what I wanted to tell. I’ve built fake settings, I ‘ve used digital backgrounds but I’ve also filmed real places. “- The result is a total vertigo, a duplication, a metamorphosis.
He freely uses photography ,video, drawing, and music in a subtle game of quotations that recall Pop Art, B-movies, videoclips and advertising. All this media matter neither becomes familiar nor is a sort of declaration of kinship or belonging; on the contrary the artist overturns and subverts its communication code.
Congost always confesses:-“ I know what the video is not, but how can I explain what it really is ?”- Maybe it’s something created just to free perception from automatic use in the same way as artifice is created in order to –“allow perception to stop and reach the highest degree of intensity and permanence”-( V. Sklovskij).
In “La Mala Pintura” Congost has no intention to deceive, on the contrary , he wants to shamelessly show the artifice literally flowing out of everything. How can the characters’ exaggerated and artificial tricks be otherwise explained? What about the blood spattered on the face of the Accademia student, who’s almost laughing? Or the “Dolce Vita” played while the final captions appear, echoing the hit by Ryan Paris who has been declared one of the ”greatest fake authors”?
Some photos taken from the video , during the shooting or in the backstage are also exhibited in our Gallery. “ The idea is to offer an extension of the video” to widen its whimsical and hilarious ferocity and mainly to show what is normally overlooked – for example the media devices inside the video – because of the fast passing of the photograms or what remains behind, hidden, like a discard. A vision that unmasks (or frees ) what is trapped once again inside or behind a story.