Fabra i Coats: Contemporary Art Center of Barcelona presents the new exhibition by sculptor David Bestué. The artist uses crumbs, waste, and detritus generated by the city over time to compose his works. Ciutat de Sorra plays with time, proposing an unlived past, memories, false or not, epiphanies of the city and its history through dust.
The material from which everything begins and where everything ends, cosmic dust and sand dust that inevitably refers to an allegory of death and the popular saying. That which the sea returns to the coast. What the landfill reminds us exists. That physical thing that does not disappear inevitably leads us to think about memories and their mimesis with said materials. Everything that is not biodegradable for the city or for our memory.
David Bestué (Barcelona, 1980) is an artist who has developed his work based on the relationships between art and architecture. In his career, he has exhibited at the Reina Sofía Museum (Madrid, 2017), La Panera (Lleida, 2021) and the Jorge Oteiza Museum (Pamplona, 2022). In addition, he has curated relevant exhibitions such as El sentit de la Escultura at the Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona, 2021).
Approached with an indivisible relationship with poetry (a habitual signature of Bestué's work), the exhibition is always linked to time and, more specifically, to historical time. The artist's sculpture is related to the pen of Juan Ramón Jiménez: "A writing of time, a memorial function of ideology and anecdote, without chronological order; like an endless strip unrolled backward from my life."
The exhibition brings together newly produced sculptural works made from materials linked to the city that, in some way, capture its most affective and poetic life, as well as works by different authors loaned by different institutions and which carry the collective image of Barcelona.
These materials, thus, charged with a different energy, diverted from their origin and their pre-established functionality, show better than anything else that history that Bestué wants to tell and that all Barcelonians know.
They bear witness to the passage of time and the general transformation of spaces more effectively than photographs and, even, better than memories. What we do not remember in an exact chronological way we fill with fantasy, invention, vague memories, blurry figures, and sensations.
We fill the gaps and voids in the discourse with something idealized and far from the reality of the moment. The works shown appeal directly to collective memory through something physical; they are memories reconverted so that the viewer better understands the context and the collective and particular memory.
They are the dead witness of change, the corpse that the sea has returned to the beach. A memory that we can see and touch, pieces, then, that justify their existence and value by themselves. Art pieces that become more real than reality itself.
On the ground floor, the artist's unlived pasts are shown. Bestué, without hierarchy or order, displays a series of objects and materials that form a kind of personal museum, the conformation of a past that the viewer would judge as dirty.
Two newspaper triangles with relevant news and city waste welcome us. There are plants that grow on the seabed of Barcelona, the Stachys maritima, now extinct; we find a spool of rope made of shredded palm that reminds us of the origin of textile factories, and a recreation of the lighting of the Font Màgica de Montjuïc.
We observe a flower that grew in the dunes of Can Tunis in the 1930s, now also disappeared; sculptures made with waste from the Sant Adrià wastewater treatment plant and vestiges of the 92 Olympics Shooting Range, a project by architects Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós.
Bestué works from destruction to its minimal expression. Sculptures that start from sand, from what has been pulverized and then reconstructed by the artistWith a temporal framework ranging from 1979 to 2011 (from the first democratic city council to the 15M movement),the exhibition is completed with four screeningsof video under the title ofProjected Diaries: Destructions, Models, Contra and Ropes.
The exhibition of projects and models contrasts reality with the idealization of small-scale representations. The projected city stands as an ambitious Barcelona, the construction of a dreamed city in counterpoint with the waste products of the works and permanent reconstruction, the degradation of materials with the inevitable passage of time.
The beautiful and the ugly exposed at the same level. Thousands of mounted images capture the mood of the city. The music of Hidrogenesse, a popular melody, points to events that are already part of the collective imagination of its citizens.
The artist's projections on the future of Barcelona are on the upper floor. With natural light, we find living matter: a wall of flower petals from the city combine with floating pears, with newspaper, with fragments of a wall under construction and columns that envelop time. Reminiscences of Olvido García Valdés's poetry try to retain and point out what is unjust and denounce. We must point out the path of pleasure and desire to reach optimism towards the future.
For Bestué, the seed, also taken as a concept, is a crucial element that revolutionizes the environment and transforms reality by showing that desired future. The seed breaks the asphalt and gray areas and imposes life and growth over what is inert, over what is dead.
The future of cities and the proliferation of green areas, parks and gardens, clean energy, is directly pointed out by the artist, implying his total communion with the idea of sustainability. The green revolution is, without a doubt, the only possible and natural path for the true development of the city.
Ciutat de Sorra, commissioned by art historian, researcher and art critic Marta Sesé Fuentes, who works with Bestué on the exhibition Pajarazos (Valladolid, 2023 – 2024), can be visited until October 22 at Fabra i Coats.