For its participation in ARCO 2018 Brussels gallery LMNO
decided to tackle the question of making the invisible visible. We therefore invited Spanish artist Pep Vidal (1980-) and Belgian-Italian collective VOID (2013-) to propose a specific stand. While the former operates within the territory of physics, the latter are involved with the world of sound.
Pep Vidal
Pep Vidal holds a Ph. D. in physics and deals with the birth of what he names “Systems”. Everything in the universe comes under that term: you, a rabbit, LMNO, ARCO, a galaxy… He imagines the energy that has led to the emergence of a given thing by way of arrows, an element which is found in the graphic vocabulary of the exact sciences. His work crosses a rational spirit with the imagination. The meticulousness of his abstract drawings enthrals us both through their complexity and through their spectacular refinement.
Pep Vidal has produced a set of new drawings for ARCO which are all polyptychs. “Systems” collaborate, negate one another, bounce off one another. The stand also includes a sculpture made out of small self-adhesive tabs. Its volume corresponds to the superimposition of hundred of tabs, or when number turns into volume.
Pep Vidal has had solo exhibitions in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, in Barcelona (2017) and at the Abron Arts Center in New York (2017). His work has been shown in the following institutions: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (2015), Caixaforum, Barcelona (2015), Casa Encendida, Madrid (2015), … He will soon be part of the Beehave exhibition at the Fundació Joan Miró (2018).
VOID
VOID brings together Arnaud Eeckhout (Belgium – 1987) and Mauro Vitturini (Italy – 1985). This collective defines itself as visual sound artists.
The name of the collective refers to the idea of emptiness: their practice keeps returning to the notions of absence, of nothingness. They adduce the immaterial as one of the cardinal points of their research.
VOID proposes two main works for ARCO. “Bruit Blanc” (“White Noise”) is a monumental installation made out of moulded turntables and vinyl records. The idea was to question the notion of “sound archaeology”: an attempt to read all the sounds which a surface has absorbed in the course of its history. All those sounds draw an image of that acoustic history: a sound archaeology of space, to put it briefly.
“Au clair de la lune” (“In Moonlight”) is a sculpture which refers back to the earliest recording in history, made by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in 1860, when he had recorded himself singing “Au clair de la lune” into a cylinder covered with lamp black. VOID has carried out the same experiment in sand, the groove cut by the sound vibrations being moulded by means of tin. The sound thereby takes on a sculptural aspect.
The VOID collective has taken part in group exhibitions at the BAM, Mons (2017) and at the ARTER Space for Art, Istanbul (2016), and will soon have a solo show at LMNO.