The 4th Guangzhou Triennial is a project lasts for three years. The inauguration exhibition entitled “Meta - question: Back to the Museum per se” launched last year, proposing various essential issues to the contemporary art, followed by 5 project exhibitions. The grand finale, a theme exhibition, will be unveiled on September 28th. Titled “the Unseen”, the exhibition will showcase artworks of nearly 80 artists from 30 countries and regions in different venues such as Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou Opera House and Grandview Plaza.
The work of Ignasi Aballi has evolved from methodological concerns rooted in matters of viewpoint, visibility and materials to nearly realist works, in the sense that they incorporate elements taken directly from everyday life. It occupies a place somewhere between the fragility of appearance-disappearance and the encyclopedic accumulation of data.
The record or reading of the passage of time plays an essential role in Aballi’s art, materialising in the accumulation of dust on objects, exposure to sunlight, the effects of the weight of books on a shelf and so on. Aballí observes and orders, classifies and shows the traces of involuntary or “natural” actions and juxtaposes them with other, more personal actions as the result of subjective artifice. Hence, images of footprints on the wall, dust accumulated on books or the yellowing of paper exposed to the sun signifies the passage of time, which, rather than eroding or removing qualities from objects, adds and accumulates them.
The media used by Aballí, in addition to the passage of time as a medium, oscillate between those conventional for artistic activity, such as painting, paper, canvas and photography, and some less familiar in this context, such as fluff taken from the filter of a clothes drier and Tipp-Ex correction fluid. The artist thus promotes a democracy of materials. His use of them is interrogative, exploiting the nature of their materiality and the consequences of their combination.