Research using optical fibre started by Pablo Armesto at LABoral goes to Marlborough in Madrid
The Asturian artist´s exhibition ‘Luz blanca’ [White Light] is on display from 15 September to 22 October
'Secuencias 24', work produced by LABoral for the exhibition 'banquet_nodes and networks'. Photo: Marcos Morilla
Research into optical fibre that Asturian artist Pablo Armesto started at LABoral will be exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in Madrid from 15 September. At this prestigious exhibition room Armest will inaugurate Luz blanca [White Light], an exhibition which draws together 10 new pieces recently created in 2010 and 2011 in which light, geometries, space, volumes and poetics are harmonised.
Pablo Armesto is one of the Asturian artists whose work has been shown since the very beginning of LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial. For instance, his installation Paso a paso [Step by Step] was produced by the Centre for the inaugural exhibition Extensiones-Anclajes [Extensions – Anchors]. This site-specific work, developed with polyestre resin, Corten steel plates, LEDs, optical fibres and power supplies, was displayed in Covadonga’s Parque del Príncipe [Prince Park], one of the points where the Art Centre “extended to” outside of its physical space to exhibit the work produced by 14 Asturian creators.
Afterwards, in 2008, Secuencias 24 [Sequences 24] formed part of banquete_nodos y redes [banquet_nodes and networks], an exhibition commissioned by Karin Ohlenschläger exploring the interactions among art, science, technology and society in Spain’s digital culture. Organised onto many fibre-glass panels over which light which changed colour flowed, Pablo Armesto’s installation aimed at materializing a kind of visual synthesis of a genomic map, and based on this, his allusion to 24 pairs of human chromosomes. Following his passage through LABoral, the inauguration, in March 2009, at ZKM-Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe -a space which is a worldwide reference for art and new technologies- was a considerable boost to LABoral and those artists presented in banquete.
From the beginning the work of Pablo Armesto has kept certain constants intact with the theory of “public art”, without renouncing other disciplines able to bring him ideas and maintain a strong commitment to the times and a high degree of plastic quality in each work. He believes in the capacity of art to formulate answers, confer aesthetic meanings and functions to the context and load it with specificity. Architecture and lights are invariably present in his creations, with great or less obviousness. In this desire to converge biology, history and technology, tradition and the contemporary, memory and place, he often uses the idea of road as a metaphor for life – the central axis of these experimentations where philosophical and symbolical arguments underlie.
In Luz blanca, the Marlborough Gallery in Madrid will present ten artworks generally conceived for hanging on the wall, of a distinct sculptural character and built up with reliefs and bas-reliefs in which the forms, colour and light seem to levitate. The luminosity is achieved by neons, fluorescent lights, LEDs and optical fibre. The purity of white, or “how to get the light out of nothing”, or how to “throw the light” are some of the interesting points resulting from the new exhibitory project by Pablo Armesto.
Pablo Armesto continues to carry out part of his research which give rise to his works -especially in those requiring wireless connections and the use of LEDs- at fabLAB of the Centre of Art and Industrial Creation.
