Exhibition: Infinite Garden. Regarding Bosch | BLACK and Light - Bilbao Fine Arts Museum

Finished

2018-05-23 • 2018-09-17

Infinite Garden. Regarding Bosch | BLACK and Light

Video Art and Digital Creation Programme

Rooms 32 and 33

The second edition of the Video Art and Digital Creation Programme, a joint initiative between the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum and Fundación BBVA – a member of the Board of Trustees of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum Foundation – is presenting a previously unexhibited video and a video installation which take their respective starting points from the Museo Nacional del Prado and from one of its most iconic works.

The video BLACK and Light by artist Álvaro Perdices has been created with the support of a Leonardo grant for cultural researchers and creators awarded by Fundación BBVA (2015). Now exhibited for the first time, it is a film and photographic essay on the galleries and works in the Museo Nacional del Prado which takes place at night. Darkness and the presence of black flow past in monochrome images, interrupted by the light of the works and their reflections with an alternation of the figurative, the abstract and the objectual.

Secondly, Bosch's triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights provided the starting point for the video installation Infinite Garden. Regarding Bosch by artist Álvaro Perdices and filmmaker Andrés Sanz. Produced in 2016 by the Museo Nacional del Prado with the aim of commemorating the 5th centenary of the artist's death, this spectacular multi-projection allows for an experience of Bosch's famous triptych in a sensory and perceptual environment in which the public can walk through and share the Garden of Eden, the Garden of Earthly Delights and Hell with the figures in the three scenes.

Both video works are now presented in the context of the Video Art and Digital Creation Programme, which was launched in 2017 with the presentation of Different Trains by artist Beatriz Caravaggio.

 

BLACK and Light
2015-2017
Idea and project: Álvaro Perdices (Madrid, 1971)
Original music: Enrique Borrajeros (Albacete, 1973) and Jordi Comellas (Manresa, Barcelona, 1966)
Video. 2 hours 25 minutes

BLACK and Light is a film and photographic essay on galleries and works in the Museo del Prado, now presented for the first time at the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum. The narrative takes place at night while the Museum is closed, with little or almost no light. The film offers a visual experience of the collection and the institution in four sections that look at issues such as pictorial handwriting, light and its absence, the works' communicatory powers and filming as a performative act which reads and constructs images.

The length of this audiovisual may coincide with that of a visit to the Prado, but the camera's slowness and self-absorption allows for an unusual approach. A sense of distance characteristic of a documentary, informative vision leads each viewer to construct their own reading of the Prado's paintings from an intimate, tactile, emotional or personal viewpoint. The Museum and its contents are submerged in a dark room in which light liberates the possibility of seeing and reading the material nature of the painting. Darkness and the presence of black flow in monochrome tones, interrupted by the light that emanates from the works and their reflections, with an alternating perception of the figurative, the abstract and the objectual. The film is accompanied by a selection of small-format still photographs which construct a new vision of a dimly-lit Prado.

BLACK and Light was created with a Leonardo grant for cultural researchers and creators awarded to Álvaro Perdices by Fundación BBVA in 2015.

 

Infinite Garden. Regarding Bosch
Work produced by the Museo Nacional del Prado, 2016
Idea and project: Álvaro Perdices (Madrid, 1971) and Andrés Sanz (Madrid, 1969)
Original music: Javier Adán (Madrid, 1975) and Santiago Rapallo (Madrid, 1974)
Video installation. 75 minutes

Jheronimus Bosch's celebrated triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights is the starting point for this highly original video installation. Following its presentation at the Museo Nacional del Prado in 2016 in conjunction with the 500th anniversary of Bosch's death, it is now being shown in Room 33 of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum.

 Infinite Garden. Regarding Bosch consists of a multi-projection of an audiovisual work distributed across 16 video channels and 10 soundtracks with a duration of approximately 75 minutes. In the work, images from Bosch's paintings are reinterpreted and recreated.

The project is the creation of artist Álvaro Perdices and filmmaker Andrés Sanz. It also features a specially-composed soundtrack by musicians Santiago Rapallo and Javier Adán.

This video installation has been designed to create an "immersive" environment in which the viewer is totally surrounded by Bosch's triptych within a perceptual space. The two creators have taken this celebrated work in the Prado as their starting point: "as if it were a map […] for creating routes and journeys…". Taking a wealth of details from high-resolution images, they have created compositions that "flood" the walls of the gallery to create an enormous pictorial tapestry which allows the visitor to enter the Garden of Eden, the Garden of Earthly Delights and Hell, with their multitude of people, creatures and bodies.

Infinite Garden. Regarding Bosch dissects, cuts out and reassembles details from the painting's numerous pictorial worlds, generating a completely sensory space which is in turn wrapped in a sound landscape with three-dimensional accents. The fragmented images, changes of scale and surprising micro-narratives acquire a new dimension, provoking in the viewer the same astonishment that Bosch's work has always produced.

These fragmented details create a journey and a route through that "significant smallness" which fascinates us and which rebels against our inability to experience all of a spatial construct that dissolves the object in the experience.

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