GameShow / PlayShow

The Blueproject Foundation presents the exhibition "GameShow/PlayShow" by the duo Fuentesal & Arenillas, the winners of the first residence of 2018, which can be seen in the Sala Project from March 9th to May 6th, 2018.

"To address the artistic practice as a game without fixed rules is one of the proposals that Fuentesal & Arenillas suggest in this project as part of the residency process at Blueproject Foundation. Starting from the idea that every artistic process is born from a mechanism of erosion of reality, the artists work on elements of their close context, a daily landscape shared by all, to empty them of content and turn them into worn, empty symbols, with which the participant in the exhibition must come into play.

As Bourriaud wrote about the exform, "its is a spontaneous nominalism whose expressive register gives him an increasingly prominent part to the material gestures and traces". To communicate without words. To play with the sign to provide a mobile, nomadic, unstable quality to it. To make stories that always take place in the space in-between, that game territory that they bring to the exhibition space as dynamograms of a flow of chains and sequences.

By turning the room into a game board whose rules have not been written or shared, their proposal makes possible the notion of an event that Levi-Strauss already talked about in The Wild Thought: “The game produces events from a structure”.

Through a series of drawings whose real reference has been doubly eroded, on the one hand as an image or trace of an experience and on the other, as the material (crayons) used for its construction, Fuentesal & Arenillas play with the viewer with the duality of the term play/game, as an unstable toponymy, an uncertain place that only acquires meaning in the process of deciphering itself.

As a development of their previous individual shows such as "We are looking for..."(Espacio Iniciarte, 2015) or "Why animals travel" (Galería Luis Adelantado, 2017), in "GameShow/PlayShow" they present three registers of the research process carried out during their residency.

In the first place, a series of large format drawings made with crayons, in which by altering the scale and decontextualizing them from their real referent, they show the unfolding of the significance, that secret flow of signifiers that combines references whose profile can be the silhouette of a building in Berlin or the final turning of a staircase in a London building; new double references to that notion of journey, displacement, mobility, fundamental in their way of approaching the artistic fact.

Secondly, in a series of wooden plates painted in blue, they present this process of referential emptying, of subtraction of the anecdote, through a series of forms whose extraction on the surface will project their image onto the exhibition space, in reference to the problem existing between names and things.

Finally, as an end to this play/game, the actual presentation of the game itself appears through a construction of wooden pieces, in which by avoiding any real reference and stressing in that character of the artist as a bricoleur, they achieve to put these quasi-objects (Michel Serres) into circulation with this idea of event, of possibility, in which the artistic production is only progression, futurity, something that will become.

Like that element that in the game designates the player. Like that movement-flow that in Deleuze's words, is creation itself. Like that significant exchange that takes place in an accomplice, affective, secret sphere of circulation. The board unfolds. Game on."

Text by Jesús Alcaide