"Flat, flatness almost flat really flat"
After he had inaugurated the gallery, presenting a selection of works at its Art on Paper stand last September, Pep Vidal is now presenting a personal exhibition on the premises of LMNO in Ixelles.
Pep Vidal enjoys the distinction of being both an artist and a scientist. He studied mathematics and physics at a high level at the University of Barcelona. This scientific knowledge has an astonishing impact on his artistic practice.
The current exhibition, ironically entitled ?Flat, Flatness, Almost Flat, Really Flat?, takes as its subject the supposedly well-known idea of planeness. What is really flat in the universe? According to science, this perfect planeness can only be contemplated through the silicon atom. This half serious (it concerns for instance applications in the field of optics), half absurd (the quest for planeness could hardly be more trifling) line of questioning guides us straight to the spirit of his work, as it combines the precision of conceptual art and hyperrealism with surrealist humour. This comes close to the aesthetics at work in the novels of Enrique Vila-Matas, that other jocular Barcelonese, in which the character often imposes on himself (unless its is imposed on him) a logic that has to be followed ad absurdum.
Among the works completed by Pep Vidal for this exhibition are drawings in which a ?character? appears. It is very small, and is connected with repetitive sequences of motifs. These drawings seem to propose an amused meandering starting from the scientific diagram as found in university textbooks. At the same time it is a real cosmogonic drawing: a map such as astrologers or seafarers used to draw in order to sketch a representation of the universe and of the place which man tends to occupy in it.
The sculpture entitled ?Penultimate Step (True Love Forever)? adds to the exhibition?s playful intention by emphasising this twofold portrait of man through science/science through man, carried out by Pep Vidal. This consists of two cylinders polished in an American laboratory in order to obtain perfectly flat surfaces. But then because of a physical phenomenon called ?superficial tension?, it so happens that the two volumes facing each other become inseparable. We can easily see the artist?s sardonic allusion as he considers this scientific phenomenon from the vantage point of the all too human experience of the ?loving couple?. In short, a way of revisiting Brancusi?s famous Kiss.
?A Stone Cut in Slices? was made on the basis of a comparable production process: starting from an unreasonably irregular stone (indeed nature always seems unwilling to follow our ever so human inclination to orthogonality), the artist slices it in fifteen two centimetre-thick pieces, as though to restore the proper planeness to which this innocent stone is supposed to be entitled. The work seems to meditate on the quite longstanding scientific habit consisting in always transferring nature on to the plane dimension of a drawn or printed map. An ultimately illogical reflex that always transferred volumetrics to the plane.
This exhibition also includes other scientific facts observed from every angle, quite entertainingly. The video ?5 Snakes? involves optical illusions concerning our perception of the coarseness or on the contrary smoothness of a plane surface. And as the guest of honour we find Eratosthenes who was a Greek scientist, famous for having been the first to measure the curvature of the earth. All of which makes us realise to what extent the planeness envisaged by Pep Vidal throws things into relief!