Three years after his latest exhibition at Espacio Distrito Cu4tro, Rambling Space, Iñaki Gracenea comes back with his most recent work. In the intervening time he has had a one man show (Surrounding, in Espai Quatre) and has participated in various group shows (Generations 2007 and Try Again, both in La casa Encendida, Madrid and Koldo Mitxelena, San Sebastian and Existencias at MUSAC). In the show with which Espacio Distrito Cu4tro opens the new season, Gracenea presents P/M/P, a project that springs from painting and in which various means screen printing, photography and video converge.
Gracenea reflects on how the power of pieces of data (images) grows exponentially every day and on how this accumulation of information occurs not because it is necessary but because it is possible. So, the massive amount of images we consume alters the evocative value of the images themselves, which alters the quality of the information to the reader. The artist focuses his projects on how images are created, from the latest virtual means to how classic disciplines deal with the new codes contained within those images.
The way in which the images are worked on comes close to what could be called a complex system. In a complex system certain rules become difficult to work out. For Gracenea it is important that the connections implicit in the system become in some cases blatant and in others obscure; this arbitrariness makes the outcome continuously fluid and the system is basically set in motion through the receptivity of the spectator, who may be able to read the interactions or relationships between the parts of the system.
In this project Gracenea has taken images from security cameras which from their poor quality transmit instant meaning thanks to what we carry in our collective memory. These images are interesting to him for their ambiguity, for the time which they transmit, for how they can alter their context and especially for their being unique and at the same time multiple. All the images he has taken refer to a particular time, tighly defined, a sequence from one place, although at the same time all the images are similar as if they represent the same work in different settings. That is the idea behind Gracenea’s work in this project, manipulating these images, interchanging them, giving them other backgrounds, adding and eliminating the people in them, with the idea of altering the images but keeping the code.
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