Javier Pividal / "FRAGMENTOS DE UN DISCURSO"

JAVIER PIVIDAL
“Fragments of a discourse”

Opening: Saturday 19th December 2009, 20.00 h
Exhibition: From 19th December 2009 to 20th February 2010

Fúcares Gallery is pleased to introduce the exhibition by Javier Pividal (Cartagena, 1971) at its space in Almagro, from 19th December 2009 to 20th February 2010.

The project Fragments of a discourse is made up of graphic media, photography and video pieces. This project has as a referent the essay by Roland Barthes entitled A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977), an essential work to tackle the foundations of the subject and his questioning of love as a fact.

Javier Pividal’s work is arranged from its beginnings around questions related to the construction of identity. The body and its images, the concept of portrait, the skin and somatisations and topics concerning privacy and affections are the tools used in the formation – an impossible formation – of an individual ‘subject’: restless and elusive, residual, incomplete.

For Pividal, the love discourse is the language of 'solitude': concerning ‘an other’, it is nonetheless exclusively created by the individual himself. In the photograph titled Dissection, a trestle table appears on which a body lies covered with a body bag with the golden foil outwards and openwork in the shape of dry autumn leaves. The suggested relationship among these elements is repeated in other pieces – for instance, those that are about the gaze as the minimum unit of love’s language, and about the need to encounter oneself in (the gaze of) ‘the other one’. His Anonyms, using a collage technique, recover and extract ideas about the writing on desire based on Barthes’s essay, whereas the video pieces certainly form the nucleus of this exhibition. In Engulfing, a nude body floating on the water heralds the first entry in Barthes’s book: ‘I am engulfed, I succumb,’ and in Hiroshima, a shadowy gaze implacably stares at us while the audio recording recites a sentence out of Marguerite Duras’s script for the film Hiroshima, mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959).

This project was carried out during 2008 in Paris thanks to a grant from CAM Plastic Arts Collection. Javier Pividal has a Degree in Fine Arts and a Master’s Degree in Museology from the Polytechnic University of Valencia.

Rubén Fernández-Costa