(IN)COMMUNICATION: PARIS

MILLARES - MUÑOZ - TÀPIES

 

The exhibition "(in)communication" brings together three remarkable works by Manolo Millares (1926-1972), Juan Muñoz (1953-2001) and Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012), which demonstrate the need to break a silence deeply rooted in Franco’s Spain by exploring new means of expression to convey the unspeakable.

 

In the latter half of the 20th Century, in the wake of two world wars - and in the case of Spain, a further 40 years of repressive dictatorship - humanity found itself confronted with the need to express the inexpressible, to say the unsayable, to break a deeply rooted silence in which so many voices went unheard. Conversely, for many today, the challenge is to decipher which of the many voices, messages, versions of the truth that reach our ears and eyes via various media is to be trusted...

Whether the voices are many or few, there is seemingly no communication without incommunication, which is to say without the difficulty of making oneself heard and understood. Incommunication is not the absence of communication, but the absence of a relation between two which gives sense and meaning to that which is being communicated. Incommunication is thus the very condition of communication itself.

 

Is it not incumbent upon us, therefore, to be active receivers ? To find out as much as we can about the emitter of a message ? To seek out their values, culture, lived experiences...

Each of the artists represented here presents us with a work for which their practice has led them to uproot an object from everyday life - be it a balcony (Muñoz), a church bell (Tàpies), or the act of sewing (Millares) - and displace or decontextualise it from other cultural markers, stripped it of its functional role, to make us work harder to identify its significance. To awaken our consciousness of that which no longer exists or that we are no longer able to see.