Artist: Boa Mistura
Dates: March 20th-29th, 2014

ANAFORMOSIS
BOAMISTURA
MARCH 20-29TH 2014
RAFAEL DOCTOR

Among the various branches of action and thought existing in the complex map of contemporary art, in recent years a new broad and participatory stream has been developing, and this new stream can fly over the established conventions of the current system without giving up its aim to be defined or categorized as artistic action.

This stream recovers the Utopian character of most of the last century’s avant-garde movements, yet starting off now from the conviction that this idealistic goal is only possible by finally breaking the idea of the artist as a myth or an enlightened, and by establishing a new paradigm of ethical creator, horizontally involved in the community he is working for.

These artists work with the radical conviction that creation can change the world. These artists believe that public space is the real canvas, the real place to settle their expressions and actions. These artists can only work by facing the essential and urgent problems of their time.

Earlier this decade Boa Mistura, a team of creators trained in design, art, architecture or engineering, developed their work with these characteristics in Madrid, a work that we agree to name as relational or collaborative art, and which is nothing but the type of work where the artist needs the direct and active complicity of the viewer who is given a new role. With this manner of facing creation, the artist knows that in front of him there is someone who is required to do something else than watching. The spectator is now someone else with whom the artist is to establish a dialogue during the whole process of making a work of art that, regardless of its shape or images, will not be actually a work of art until its social objective has been met. Thus, the work of art ceases to be an object and becomes something abstract and intangible: the work is a successful achievement, something that enriches the lives of the people it was done for and whose complicity was demanded.

Logically, Boa Mistura’s works hardly fit in the structures that museums and other conventional spaces can offer, essentially because those places are designed to accommodate forms or images and, as I stated above, the works of these artists are social achievements that break into those communities with which they are engaged and for which they work.

Therefore what you can see these days at the PONCE+ROBLES gallery is not the work of art itself, which is something impossible to grasp through images or shapes, but the final visual conclusion of their long work processes, full of life and experience, such as they have developed in various parts of the world.

This exhibition is composed exclusively of the visual conclusions of the projects that they call “Anamorphosis”, different experiences in cities where they have established a visual game between words and landscape, between the two-dimensionality of the representation and the three-dimensionality of the habitabilty, between concept and desire, between Utopia and reality.

Boa Mixtura’s work, like the works of other groups or active individuals who have appeared in many parts of the world in recent years, is essencially interesting for the live and actual experience that they bring to the world of contemporary creation, for its practical and committed sense and for the fact that its practice implies a new formulation of the idea of art in today’s world, a world that needs and dreams of an art capable of becoming a real tool to achieve a better human society.