“I’m not an artist, I’m a researcher of perpetual motion matrices”.

Antoine Laval

Belgian-born, New York-based Antoine Laval opens the gallery’s summer season with the exhibition Archetypeswhich stands out for the production of interactive tools rather than works of art, offering the possibility of producing sequences and storing the memory of movement. The forms derived from its installation are self-generated and fixed in its movement.

Antoine Laval’s exhibition is an exception, given that, during more than twenty-five years of research, he refused to show his research in public. When Huc Malla, the gallery’s director, became acquainted with the moving metres, sequences and matrices, he quickly connected Laval’s proposals with the concrete art works that Bombelli (former director of the gallery) had made internationally known at the time. He also related them to Marcel Duchamp, who rejected representational art in favour of a kinetic and mental art in consideration of the spectators. Laval’s early work became known in Barcelona, at Metronom, and at the Joan Miró Foundation, and he often collaborated with the writer Vicenç Altaió and the magazine Eczema, in the transition from textualism and the conceptual to post-modernism.

Archetypes and Mobile metric editions were developed in Brussels and Barcelona in the 1980s and were conceived as an interactive instrument linking individuals to traffic. Over the years, the phrases folded into the metres were deployed in manipulations of the tools and, more specifically, in the construction and deconstruction of signs, forms and ideas.

The exhibition also includes the Sinai drawings, which consist of a series of experiences in the desert that deal with the visible through the movement of liquid matter. As Laval says in the text of a moving metre “A parpetual seismography does not so much concern the object as it does the psiche”.