Art review: 'Estrato Cero'

Many artists find their inspiration by looking up toward the heavens, à la Michelangelo. Others look downward and discover treasures unnoticed by others. My family and I scour the beaches every summer, returning home with bits of broken cups and saucers, colourful sea glass, bottle caps and fish hooks. We usually fashion these crude bits and bobs into some kind of usable or wearable art, mounting them with big globs of glue onto scraps of painted wood.

Therefore, I am inspired by artists like Madrid-based Julia Llerena, who spent her month-long residency at the Blueproject similarly looking down. As the foundation’s second artist-in-residence, she collected detritus from the streets of Barcelona and reconfigured it into an impressive set of art installations called ‘Estrato Cero’ (‘Layer Zero’), exhibited in the gallery’s front room. The beauty of her work lies in the meticulous presentation of these objets trouvés. Her methodical observation of modern society’s contribution to the top layer of urban archaeology gives us beautiful artwork made up of discarded pieces of contemporary civilisation. The reference to layering in the exhibition’s title highlights the similarities between Llerena’s work and that of an archaeologist, who maps the exact location of where the artefact was discovered within the layers of the Earth’s surface. ‘Estrato 0’, for example, displays dozens of ‘archaeological’ objects across a specially built horizontal surface that occupies almost half of the gallery. Gooseneck lamps here and there illuminate carefully placed objects whose locations are meticulously archived by the artist. The spotlights force the visitor to closely consider these pieces, as opposed to the many others arranged across the vast surface.

Llerena has fancifully recreated on paper the possible whole objects from which some of the random bits and pieces may have first originated. The titles explain her work, which is both imaginative and thoughtful: ‘Estrato’ (Stratum), ‘Pensamiento’ (Thought), and ‘El Impulso de Archivo’ (The Momentum of Archiving). Whether mounted in regular intervals on plate glass or arranged on archaeological maps of the city, this random selection of objects creates an intoxicating rhythm: screw, glass, hook, ring, gasket, bracelet, hinge, shard, repeat. The pattern of objects in ‘Pensamiento’ actually spells out a hidden message derived from the first letter of the name of each object. (The artist will not reveal the secret.)

This summer, the gallery will live up to its name when a heavy dose of blue is installed in the back room of Blueproject. Prominent artists, such as Warhol, Basquiat and Lucio Fontana, will be represented by works whose primary colour is blue. Yves Klein, who has his own ultramarine pigment named after him will, of course, be represented by a velvety blue Venus de Milo. The ‘salotto’ gallery will present ‘BLUE’ between June 21st and November 4th. 

The Blueproject Foundation is a non-profit contemporary art foundation located in the Born.