Throughout his extensive career, this exhibition project at Kaplan Projects gallery allows the artist Marcos Vidal to revisit his key themes within his usual field of interpreting objects and the domestic sphere: DIY, technological dependency, underwear, barbecues, the pandemic… works in sculpture and painting which, with his characteristic humour, offer a more critical perspective on our habits and experiences.
In the artist’s own words:
“Each task requires the appropriate tool—a handsaw, a spatula, a trowel—but each object also carries connotations beyond its practical function. Objects are imbued with meanings, sometimes differing according to culture, country, or individual. Logs, pipes and lead channels, iron, wooden beams—materials that are practically raw—are also subjects open to transformation, and their use can take on another meaning when an installation or sculpture is constructed from them.”
“We are becoming increasingly dependent on electricity and technology. We look for a socket every 24 hours due to our daily need to recharge our devices. Chargers acquire an importance we did not anticipate. They speak of temporality and resources, which is why they grow in size when represented. The lightning bolt emerging from the knife is the latest electricity bill. That is what my sculpture is about: observing the everyday, domestic languages, the new meanings we create, and the use of contemporary materials in ways that alter and intensify those connotations. Thus, this exhibition addresses these new situations and how these added meanings portray and define our time.”
Dieter Ronte, referring to Marcos Vidal’s work, writes:
“Marcos Vidal’s objects quickly evade classical classification through language. Do they reveal an objective reality, are they objectively true, or are they plastic carriers of an objective perception?
Vidal breaks with conventional ways of seeing, as well as with the functional arrangements through which society facilitates its own understanding and general coexistence. He invents laws and rules to guarantee the functionality of objects. Yet these descriptions of objects are constructions that remain valid only until a new invention demands a different truth.”
Vidal is fascinated by objects. He collects them—saws, cables and pipes, spatulas, electrical sockets, measuring tapes—and, with particular preference, wooden blocks that he transforms. Only their direct utility is excluded by the new character of the work. Each theme addressed becomes a poeticisation of the real object and, at the same time, a critical questioning of functionality and acceptance within the capitalist and commercial world of our society.
Therefore, the artist’s works are not a game, but the result of his own critical experiences with the habits and rules of our society and, at the same time, the beautification of the object, which is now left only with an aesthetic life ahead due to its new uselessness.
In his 1962 essay of the same name, the Italian poet and philosopher Umberto Eco refers to this process as the “opera aperta”, the open work of art, which gains independence in the mind of each individual viewer and is completed in different ways. Each viewer brings their own private connotations to the artwork.
