Fragments / Fractions / Pieces / Photons (Copie du 12/07/2024)

For his third solo exhibition with LMNO, entitled ?Fragments/Fractions/Pieces/Photons?, artist-cum-physicist Pep Vidal explores fragmentation through the restoration, reinterpretation or partial modification of obsolete objects. Combining art once again with the exact sciences, Pep Vidal analyses his themes of study in a methodical and systematic manner in such a way as to reveal the complexity of their various constitutive elements and to extract from them a supplementary stratum of information, one invisible at first sight. This exhibition addresses the theme of division via a sequence of points of view.

The first series in this new project, entitled ?Temperament of a Piano?, is part of a project presented recently at the Fundació Antoni Tapiès in Barcelona, and deals with the progressive restoration of a hundred odd year old piano. As the piano gradually got repaired, five recordings in collaboration with the musician Agathe Casals were made of Johann Sebastian Bach?s renowned ?Well Tempered Clavier?. On each of the five scores the false notes produced by the still incompletely tuned piano are marked in red. The installation, comprising the five recordings and score sheets, presents a quest for sound perfection through an empirical approach and through iteration.

For ?Collaborative Paintings?, the second, hitherto unseen, project, the artist intervenes on old paintings found at flea markets or on the street. The affixing of an annotated sheet of tracing paper allows Pep Vidal to create a new fragment of information, meanwhile emphasising a specific element in the composition. The latter series manifests both the existence of those fragments and the prevailing tendency to gather them together into a whole. In the form of a puzzle, of a piece of embroidery, of leaves emerging, growing and falling off a tree, or of a single spot of light bringing together a large number of photons.

Pep Vidal (Rubi, 1980) holds a Ph. D. in physics from the university of Barcelona. His work has been shown in numerous prestigious institutions, including the Fundació Antoni Tapiès in Barcelona (2023), FRAC Picardie (2021), the Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art (2019), the Fundació Joan Miró (2018) or the National Museum of Art of Catalonia (2017). His work features in numerous private collections in Europe as well as in various foundations and museal institutions.