Pep Vidal

08 June 2024 – 24 Aug 2024 ADN Galeria

The Cézanne and Sainte-Victoire exhibition: catalog raisonné brings together recent projects around artistic and scientific methodologies for get closer and get to know nature. One of the works included in the exhibition has the direct collaboration of the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC).

In his fourth exhibition at ADN Gallery, entitled Cézanne and Sainte-Victoire: catalog raisonné, are presented the works Effect of Altitude (2023-2024) and Deep Sea Water Mass (2024).

Efecte d'Altitud is a series made up of more than a hundred replicas of works by Paul Cézanne (mostly paintings and watercolours, and more than a dozen drawings), each representing the Sainte-Victoire mountain (France) in different stages of the life of the painter

Pep Vidal's intervention in these works focuses on placing vegetable paper and add some signs like arrows, lines, trees or human figures. In this way, Vidal tries to describe possible meteorological and environmental phenomena that could become in the landscape described, according to verifiable data both from the time in which Cézanne depicted it as it is today. But also based on the content of each example of the series made by the French painter.

speculative environment where not only the exploration of atmospheric phenomena has a place which could have taken place then or now in Provence, but also poetic speculation, own and personal. A speculation within the limits of research scientist who already advanced impressionism with the tendency to repeat. the same object, different times, different angles: an almost obsessive fixation on variations which allows to describe the changes.

The exhibition room plays a role in this whole process in which Efecte d'Altitud immerses us an important role. Each work that makes up the series is arranged occupying a place inside of a graph that spans space and time. Pep wants to show the reproductions of Cézanne both based on a chronological axis and also referring to the places where they are exposed In this way, we can understand the evolution of the painter's view of la montaña and see graphically the places where these works are exhibited today we take into account the cities in relation to their altitude with respect to sea level.

Mass, in collaboration with the Institute of Marine Sciences, to whom Pep has applied for one sample of water extracted at a depth of 1011 meters from the Atlantic Ocean, A "counterpoint" to the work on Sainte-Victoire in a completely literal sense, since the official height of the mountain is 1011 meters. However, it is not only a counterpoint of altitude, but also as a method of knowledge. While Cézanne analyzed the mountain from a distance and repeatedly for more than 30 years, Deep Sea Water Mass is one water sample taken for a scientific study, where a series of parameters are measured using specialized instruments to obtain concrete and precise results.

The idea of ​​catalog reasoned, which is applicable to both the artistic classification and the taxonomy, dissects and recomposes a series of objects using a methodology that the catalog itself must explain. Pep Vidal's catalog raisonné on the Sainte- Victoire de Cézanne, on the other hand, erodes the rigidity of established methodologies strict Accuracy and erudition give way here to the uncertain and the probable.

Photos: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy of ADN Gallery

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Curated by Sonia Martínez and Eva Bravo. Permanent installation. Sempere.

This work tells us about control in a multidirectional way: from the human being towards the water and the territory with the construction of the reservoir; of water towards human beings in possible flood zones; and of the flooded/floodable memory that remains hidden under the waters or by the vegetation that grows where it is not controlled.

Pep Vidal has recovered the materials that remained semi-hidden and abandoned on this plot, grouping them into geometric shapes in an attempt to move from chaos to order (control), with the possibility of being flooded again by water or vegetation (lack of control).

Photos: Miguel Lorenzo. Courtesy of IVAM

Curated by Chus Martínez. Feb 2023 – Sept 2023 Collegium Museum.

When I was in Arévalo I went to visit some abandoned houses and in one of them I found a room with the walls covered, from top to bottom, with lottery numbers. About 1000 tickets collected over more than 30 years. For me, who is a mathematician by training, it fascinated me. So what I have done for the exhibition has been two things:

On the one hand, I have preserved the collection, removing all the tickets from the walls - before they are going to demolish - and putting them back in the same arrangement as in the original, in a replica of the room of the same dimensions. It has been made of methacrylate to be able to see both the back and front of the tickets.

On the other hand, the collection has been reactivated, since each year a new ticket will be purchased with the number that a mathematical algorithm predicts (from all the previous numbers), expanding the collection each year with a new contribution.

Photos: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy of Collegium Museum

Nov 2022 - Jan 2023. ADN Galeria. Barcelona

Last year, Pep Vidal bought something online from Great Britain and it came wrapped in small cushions of air intended to absorb the potential impact of transit, and he wondered where the air had come from. Could he find out somehow?

With Air de.. the artist dives deep into the world and physical properties of air, and more specifically, into those of bubble wrap. We all love popping the little air bubbles in the wrap, that small yet intense sound, and the force in our fingers until finally, the bubble explodes. Pop! But what’s behind–or better put, inside–bubble wrap?

To explore this, the artist has pursued various avenues of research, including exploiting the air used for packaging to talk about the globality of the world in which we live as well as to lament and reclaim the quality of the air we breathe, studying the volumetric physicality of bubble wrap and the air it contains, and finally, reflecting on the question: does air somehow belong to everybody and at the same time nobody?

For the exhibition, Vidal collected pieces of bubble wrap, classified them based on aspects of their origin, such as the country they came from, the specific store where they were found, or the person who had used it for wrapping, and then put them in acrylic boxes.

Finally, there are two pieces that are transversal in every sense of the word. Crossing a border is easy (if you’re a cloud) is a two-channel video where a cloud is seen crossing the French-Catalan border (both from the French perspective and the Catalan one) following only the laws of thermodynamics. And in The light that doesn’t go out, the artist uses a solar panel and a light to show the photons that, after leaving the Sun and traveling thousands of kilometers, eventually make it to the roof of the gallery, having transformed into electrons and, at the same time, light.

Photos: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy of ADN Gallery

Curated by Sonia Martínez and Eva Bravo. Permanent installation. Castell de Cabres. Spain.

"Divide a piece of land in two, and in two, and in two, and in two..." consists of taking a piece of land, and subdividing it with dry stone walls, as in some way as it has been done in the lands during so many years in Castell de Cabres, but always with the same piece of land. Making a kind of fractal terrain, a labyrinth of divisions where the viewer, when he goes there, if he wants to get to the end, will have to follow a path in the form of a spiral.

Photos: Miguel Lorenzo. Courtesy of IVAM

Curated by Carolina Grau. Museu de l'Empordà. 2022.

The piece "It is easy to cross borders (if you are a cloud)" (2022) is a double video of a cloud from two different points of view. One from a person who is in France, and another person who is in Catalonia. Both people follow a cloud, the same one, that passes a border, only transforming following the laws of thermodynamics. In these times of global uncertainty, this piece shows that perhaps things are not being done right.

In the National Collection of Contemporary Art Generalitat de Catalunya.

Curated by Glòria Picazo. Fundació Suñol.

The “Passeig de Gràcia 98” project consists of the reactivation of some pieces that were exhibited in the former space of the Fundació Suñol, on Passeig de Gràcia 98, which was active from 2007 to 2019.

Now that space is completely empty. From being able to be in that void and recording photos of the exhibitions, I began to study some pieces. Like a detective, calculating, looking for remains, clues, algorithms, signals, that give me the possibility of establishing intimate contact through their volume and shape.

As a reactivation, I compare some of the pieces with everyday objects, as well as relating them in terms of energy resources, maintenance, transportation, weight, etc. Then I take photos of those objects in the same place where the pieces were exhibited at the Fundació. This comparison has a double function:

On the one hand, it allows me to explore some pieces and reach deep knowledge - up to what I want. I could spend my entire life measuring the volume of one of the pieces in the collection, without reaching its exact value, but knowing it like no one else does, perhaps not even the artist himself.

Por otro lado, me permite simplificar la pieza a nivel geométrico. Depurarla, compactarla, como en topología algebraica, dejándola simple, fácil, smooth. Esa sencillez final me produce un gran placer.