from February 22nd to March 27th
Laia Noal presents 8, an installation exhibition configured by eclipses, lunar phases, fires and coal. Anna Llopis accompanies it with a text. The exhibition can be visited from Monday to Thursday from 9 am to 2 pm and from 3 pm to 6 pm and on Fridays from 9 am to 3 pm.
"The thunderbolt brought down to earth the first fire for mortals; starting from the thunderbolt spread all the ardor of the flames."
Lucretius, De rerum natura, s.Y BC.
Between August 4 and 5, 2023 a fire burned more than 500 hectares of mountain between Portbou and Colera. In a few hours the natural landscape as it had existed was completely exterminated by the flames fanned by the tramontana. The transforming capacity of fire, generating both destruction and rebirth, transience and eternity, as well as its link with the primitive and atavistic, is the starting point of Laia Noal's work, which reflects on the tension between opposites, the cyclicality and disconnection with the elements and nature that often leads to urban life today.
After the fire, Noal goes through the burnt territory, collects the ashes, stores them in little metal boxes and, before taking them to his workshop in Hospitalet, he geolocates the place where he found them. Each location will be a point of a constellation drawn on the map. In the city you can't see the stars or the burnt mountains. Only the ashes in little metal boxes are certainty of a landscape that seems so far away that it might not exist right now. Noal extracts black pigments from the ashes and with them paints skies, moons and eclipses; light and darkness, bodies in an endless transformation, inexhaustible orbits, tensions in equilibrium.
The infinity of finitude.
Anna Llopis
