A few days ago, an exhibition dedicated to Oswald Aulèstia, that character who cannot be called anything other than a character, opened at Casa Rius: he seems, in effect, someone invented. Better known for his career as a forger of works of art, especially lately with the Filmin documentary (also broadcast by TV3), Oswald Aulèstia now stands in the middle of Enric Granados street as if he intended not only to challenge the collectors who have preferred not to attend the opening but, above all, art itself. Perhaps to redeem sins or surely for nothing to do with asking for forgiveness, Aulestia's work poses the question of whether his art is also a trap or, instead, contains truth. To know if Oswald falsifies himself, if he has an authentic story or if, instead, he is just continuing the joke. I anticipate that, whatever the conclusion of this article, both options seem fine to me.
But I must stop, first, to present a space that for me has been one of the best surprises this spring. Opened a year ago, Casa Rius looks from the facade like any establishment on Granados street with its hallway with a counter at the entrance and a small room with paintings at the end. What you don't know is that, as almost always happens, just putting in the tip is impossible or rather it's an excuse and in this case the tip gives way, after a remarkable collection of vinyl singles well organized and plasticized on shelves, to an endless succession of rooms and halls and skylights that shows you that the heart of this city still contains hidden and at the same time colossal treasures. A kind of game room on the left, a well-decorated projection room on the right, with rows of seats taken from a theater or cinema, and then an immense hallway with a new, well-equipped kitchen and a patio with a bar that, if you thought it was the end, in truth is only a vestibule towards the large workshop/exhibition hall crowned by a triangular glass roof that closes the sky of the light well.
And I could go on, but I think I've already sufficiently outlined the magnitude of the space and the surprise, which immediately makes one ask about its origins and whose it is and whose it was and why I didn't know about this wonder before. The answer: an early 20th-century workshop of the sculptor Josep Rius i Mestres (a renowned sculptor of religious images and nativity scenes), designed by the architect Salvador Puiggròs i Figueres and abandoned for too many years. Not in Poblenou, or in Raval, no. Here. In the middle of the Eixample.
Modernism (we are in a modernist space) is, more than a past era, an attitude: the promoters of this space try to imitate the ambition and cultural restlessness of the era by connecting Barcelona with global artistic trends, although until now they have dedicated a good part of their efforts to renting the spectacular space to large international companies for exclusive events. We will see what kind of soul they want to incorporate into the dynamics of the house, which for now functions more as a space than as a generator, but which has just begun and does so with an exhibition that evidently, before opening curiosity, seeks to provoke. Now we go. Oswald Aulestia: the work.
Catalan Pop-art, reads the legend presented by the artist. It is a fair definition if we complement it with the idea that, to understand each other, Aulestia's paintings could mostly be vinyl or cassette covers, wall decorations of old boîtes or comic strips from an underground magazine of the 70s or 80s. But it is more than that: the signature is unmistakable in each piece, and so is the tragicomic mix between joke and sadism. The figures are intentionally inexpressive, like mannequins or automatons, but the linear and homogeneous use of colors (especially the basic ones) well arranged like fabrics on the canvas make these unsettling presences a kind of anthropomorphic (and almost always androgynous) friends who just want to play with you. Aulestia cuts, places, glues, distributes letter and number decals without apparent order or concert, makes typography a decorative complement and seems to want to say, in his most pop hypothesis, that today reality is given to us by the saturation of screen colors (in his case, I think more television) and by the immense amount of information-junk that we must process whether we like it or not. Suddenly a frame profile, a bottle, a set of objects that become a human form (even if they walk on a wheel), many wide lips, many white noses as if extracted from a cutout, swirls of letters that form hair, penises that look like lipsticks and straight lines that want to give a clear and geometric direction to the gaze of a undone subject. A hybrid art, bittersweet, tragicomic as we said, trans, punk and pop. And undeniably Catalan.
Aulestia's work is almost always a generational portrait, I would even dare to say a self-portrait, filtered through a kind of magic that should make time stand still and keep us forever children. The controversial figure of Oswald Aulèstia could only exist here, of this I am sure, and in a way his art also inseparably evokes a profound Mediterranean spirit. Daft Punk (or perhaps Supertramp too) meets the colors of Joan Miró but imbued with Warhol's daring and Pau Riba's bad temper, meaning that everything is very much from there but also very much from here, very Eixample, very much from the corner bar. Like that space, which fortunately, and no matter how many international companies rent its rooms, can only exist here. Being strange or different, then, should never scare us. To stop being so would directly imply becoming false. When, in any case, what we should aspire to is to be counterfeited.