REPLAY Nelo Vinuesa and Bimotor

Past event

“In 1913 I had the happy idea of attaching a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and observing what resulted”.”
Marcel Duchamp, Appropos of “Readymades” (1961)

«Assemblage (a more inclusive term than the usual «collage») is an artistic practice of fixing natural or manufactured objects, initially not used as art materials. This is how a 1961 MoMA press release described one of the actions that are essential to understanding the evolution of art from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, following the exhibition »The Art of Assemblage«, curated by the famous Princeton professor and MoMA curator William »Bill« Seitz. Since then, the act of assemblage has taken on new meanings and its conceptual development - not only the formal one - places this resource in readings, registers and artistic contexts of all kinds. Surrealism, Dadaism, Pop Art, Povera or Minimalism would not be explained in the same way without this development; nor would video art, installations or the digital, multimedia and interactive arts.

The Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia (FCAYC) hosts the work of Nelo Vinuesa (Valencia, 1980) and BIMOTOR - some of his collaborations with Samuel Ortí (La Coruña, 1977) - through a selection of works spanning a period of activity from 2006 to the present, some of them made specifically for the space of these old schools, the headquarters of FCAYC.

REPLAY is argued within the framework of an exploration of artistic and cultural registers that, with respect to the context of FCAYC's systematic work, constitute an «out-of-field» that is essential to provide perspective to any research work. Under this criterion, the exhibition proposes an approach to the wide range of plastic, discursive and production links that are manifested in the work of Nelo Vinuesa, through the analysis of the mixed media and technology. He presents works, which give rise to interactions and sounds - as can be experienced in his three-dimensional objects - from an assemblage-based development. low-tech, images, with formal references to collage, and assemblages made with in situ.

Practices and languages, all of them, which also constitute the link with the theme of this exhibition, which encompasses the symbolic, play, chance and landscape.

The title of the exhibition alludes both to the reproduction and repetition inherent in the actions triggered by technology, and to the act of playing and the role that memory and recollection play in relation to games.

Likewise, the multitude of cultural allusions present in the works of Nelo Vinuesa, of the readymade to pop aesthetics, overlapping with the relationship between art, society and technology, constitute an appropriate link with a good part of the itineraries of the didactic area of FCAYC.

The specific thematic references chosen by Nelo Vinuesa encompass situations recognisable to the visitor, many of them present in our daily lives. As the critic José Luis Pérez Pont points out, they include, among other things, a reading of current affairs as a simulacrum, in which contempt for politics, the environmental crisis, the mismanagement of states and the repercussions of these aspects on the citizenry are amalgamated. The sarcasm - or its absence - in the reflection of all this is the property of the dialogue between Nelo Vinuesa, and Samuel Ortí, with each one of us.