Enric Farrés Duran at NoguerasBlanchard | Madrid
Whereas many artists have turned to “the archive” as an allegory for the varied mechanisms and politics concerned in historiography, few have completed so whereas resisting the urge to create a dense, unwieldy archive of their very own. Enric Farrés Duran’s exhibition “Acid Love Endlessly”—the results of the artist’s current collaboration with the Museu d’Artwork Contemporani de Barcelona’s historic archive—foregrounds the instruments and fetishes of the archivist, assembling a set of bleak and humorous objects that present fast, conceptual plunges into the quixotic beliefs of artwork conservation.
Whereas some items play as smart-alecky jokes alongside the well-trodden path of artwork’s arbitrary techniques of valuation (Crepúsculo—Certificado a medias [Twilight—Half Certificate, all works cited 2022], presents a clean, framed certificates of authenticity, evoking the presence of the “actual” doppelgänger subsequent door within the gallery’s workplace), Duran’s work is most fascinating when the preliminary punch line resonates with a deeper, weirder poignancy. In Hongo disecado (Desiccated fungus), an envelope bearing the letterhead of Barcelona’s Fundació Antoni Tàpies has been laced with a mold-inducing agent, leading to dried brush marks and fungal blooms that lightly parody the late Catalan painter’s contaminated, Matterist type.
Half-hidden close to the exit, a stack of discovered images pasted one atop the opposite hangs vertically alongside the wall. The work’s title, Ostra (Oyster) appears, at first look, a reference to the mercurial swirls on the floor of its irreparably water-damaged topmost picture. Upon request, nevertheless, the work might be faraway from the wall and pried open like a deck of playing cards to disclose a tiny picture of a pearl. The gesture, carried out casually with ungloved palms, comes as a real shock—an occasion of an establishment momentarily collaborating in its personal unraveling, and a suggestion that it’s one thing invisible inside the work, greater than the work itself, that warrants preserving.
— Ren Ebel
