LaCa Projects presents Intimismos, featuring works by Barcelona-based artist, Franco Fasoli, and Berlin-based artist, Octavio Garabello.
This duo exhibition showcases each artist's intimate relationship with friends, lovers, technology, social media, and even art history, contextualized by the European city in which they have chosen to live. Through this study of intimacy, Fasoli and Garabello's latest works in painting and collage create a window through which we observe their daily, private moments: a bohemian way of living in a globalized world.
Exhibition text by Laura Ojeda Bär:
After the emergence of the avant-garde movements of the beginning of the twentieth century, art history finally came to consider the idea of the artistic genius to be outdated and that of the artist-worker was established.
Genre painting—scenes of daily life, landscapes, still lifes, portraits—among many other pictorial forms was irreversibly changed. As workers themselves, artists were no longer observers of other people’s habits and lives; instead, their own lives, their own everydayness came into play because it was the same as that of those who would observe their work.
Cell phone in hand, Anne is running late… as usual. It already got dark a while ago, though it’s not even 6 p.m. She’s running late, but she still stops a moment to take a photo of the scene in front of her that reminds her of her sister, Lotti. Sent. She waits for a couple of cars to go by and crosses in the middle of the street.
Bzzzz. Her phone screen lights up, a photo from her sister and the only clock in her house: time for lunch, it’s so hot. She opens the fridge and finds some fruit in the full splendor of its ripeness. Perfect for a smoothie. She prepares the ingredients, more water, more ice, more seeds, and now it’s all ready. The final color of her concoction is especially attractive, a sort of intense violet-rose in her glass that’s tinted with graduated shades of green. She takes a picture of it for Mep. She remembers Anne’s message. Photo and emoji, cold and night. “Wow, beautiful,” but just one checkmark, Anne’s not getting the messages.
Today we are bombarded by costumbrista images, between instant messages and social media. They reflect the anxiety and unease we struggle with in contemporary life. Natural disasters, social inequality, wars, xenophobia—among other things—seem to close off the idea of possible futures, utopias, or grand narratives. These images are perhaps the last refuge we allow ourselves so as to carry on in this panorama of paralyzing uncertainty. In this case, the paintings take as their source this graphic wellspring that swells larger day after day—producing new iterations within that daily repetition—seeking out situations that dissolve into our collective experience without losing their individual specificity.
Mep wakes up startled, his computer alerts him to a new message. He forgot to close the web app. Half-asleep and a little annoyed, he gets up and sees what it is. A composition of thousands of things, and in the center an intensely colored glass takes over the screen. Hmmm. Lotti and her pretty objects. With half-closed eyes he looks for a photo that he took a few days ago of some kids in the park, one dressed from head to toe in lime green, the other pink-grey, and adds a “sleeping. Talk later.” Sent.
Octavio and Franco were born in Argentina, where they took their first steps as artists, made their first paintings. They’ve lived abroad for years, Berlin and Barcelona mostly, a strategic, work-related, and emotional relocation. Throughout the years, their works have dealt with different themes. But on this occasion, they intersect. In “Intimismos” they intersect: the works presented in this show were born under the sign of the cell-phone camera lens. A sort of mechanical eye repositioned outside of each person’s head.
As these are intimate images from the everyday lives of both artists, it is not unusual that they have chosen techniques with which they feel at home: Franco, his papers, oils, and metallic structures; Octavio, his acrylics. Their formal decisions are not up for discussion; they are those necessary for them to feel comfortable and able to focus on the choice of which specific instants of their daily flow are those that contain the greatest intensity. Thus, they show us the life of the artist-worker: scenes of solitude and moments of being in society. What and who accompanies them.
Both artists make permanent that which is fleeting that keeps us all company day after day, that series of images that flow before us and remind us of the scrolling of social media; each image functions like a star within a constellation—at once shining and twinkling, unique and individual, but that acquires its real weight in relation to the rest.
