Permanent present: Barcelona

Catalan Version

Spanish Version

Western culture has traditionally understood time as a linear succession: an origin, a development and an end. This structure has given meaning to history, memory and even to the way of understanding life. However, in contemporaneity this linearity seems to have entered into crisis. The origin continues to exist as a point of departure, and the end as the inevitable limit of every process. But it is in this intermediate space that contemporary experience unfolds.

A present that no longer functions as a passing instant, but as a permanent condition, in which meaning is found neither in the origin nor in the end, but in the way we inhabit this interval.

This shift also transforms the way we understand art.

Permanent Present brings together works that inhabit this space outside chronological linearity, where the different layers of history coexist and remain in permanent dialogue, through artists such as Casas, Sunyer, Léger, Picasso, Chagall, M. Andreu, Miró, Calder, Magritte, Dalí, Lichtenstein, Tàpies, Chillida, A. Muñoz, Genovés, Saint Phalle, Botero, Valdés, Chordà, Barceló, M. Pla, Alcaraz, Rondinone, Giménez, Serra, Pratts, Enguany, Vogel, Barquero, Hoz and Domestic Data Streamers.

The two ends of this journey are embodied in two works that do not describe time, but rather problematize it. Dalí’s La Venus spatiale (1977/1984), with its soft watch and egg, places the archetype of creation under the pressure of a time that is disintegrating: the watch questions every stable perception of duration, while the egg alludes to the potential of that which has not yet acquired a definitive form. There is no measurable end to the origin because the origin always escapes. By contrast, Tàpies’s Duat (1994) takes its name from the Egyptian realm of the dead in order to construct not a closed end, but a threshold: a surface in which matter, signs and everyday objects continue to accumulate memory and experience beyond any conclusion.

IN THE CURATOR’S WORDS, VICENÇ ALTAIÓ:

“The exhibition presents works by artists who participate in an open system, far removed from facility and old customs. An art that was, and is, made through a synthesis of opposites: in a waking dream state, of images and words, of poor art, of speaking matter and of the Arabic within the ultra-local universal. A time of impact and illumination, visited, in which history and the future meet in an immemorial time. Permanent time carries within it the seed of rupture, of change.”