Artist: Álvaro Gil
Dates: November 26th 2020 to January 23rd 2021

I think that, in some way, we find it comforting to fill the gaps in a space. Perhaps it’s the filling of gaps in a well-organised weekly planner, which shows us how to break down the future tense and thus how to plan it. Or stocking your kitchen cupboards with food and feeling like you can hold out for a while. Or turning the key in the lock and leaving it there so that you sleep more soundly…
Being an artist concerned with “filling” is playing with space-time.

“To fill” implies a container of specific dimensions. If you don’t calculate both volumes accurately (the container and the substance filling the container), the substance may overflow and enter another containing space. This overflow or spill wants to keep filling, although its root and origin are of another nature and form. Adaptation always implies evolution and change, giving the verb “to fill” a tremendously positive and natural dimension.

Working with overflowing processes in my studio forces me to relinquish control over spaces and their metrics. Things reinvent themselves from new logical perspectives over which I have no mastery, adjusting and expanding as they follow their own natures. This kind of intentional loss of control creates new adaptive forms in a liquid matrix, forcing time, chemistry and air to stop, solidify and hold themselves in a new setting. A hiatus in form that harks back to a previous time and movement. A displacement that advances backwards over a past relief providing an outline.

In my creative process I establish different spaces for action:

I start by searching for ways to save time and mathematically decompose forms, ideas or sensations of natural, intellectual and soft origins, using a technically calibrated approach to transform materials from the plane constructed by these thoughts or sensations.
During the process I add past formulas that I have learnt which act solely on the skin and comfort me from my pictorial being. They are usually linked to strange, geeky symbolic issues.

Once these things are constructed and roughly painted, I start to negate the pre-established paths that have already been walked. I need to start a process of exploration, to somehow tangle up this perfectly parted hair, this carefully calibrated inception. To do this, I add processes which imply movement and overflow. In this way I succeed in invading my own ideas and filling these things or pieces with something over which I have no control, and which I think has more to do with an unknown third person who completes them and fills them with meaning.

From Platonic solids to making slime is about everything I have just described; from a solid start, maintaining what we have learnt, to an unknown ending, viscous and mobile, yet solid and stationary.

Álvaro Gil (Corella, 1986) has a degree in Fine Arts and a PhD from the University of the Basque Country. Since 2008 he had individual exhibitions in galleries such as Satélite de Querétaro, México, Louis 21 in Palma de Mallorca or Raquel Ponce in Madrid, as well as in institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum and the Sala Rekalde in Bilbao or the Huarte Center in Navarra. His artistic interventions in the Ribera de Bilbao Market and on Trengandín de Noja beach should be highlighted. His work has been seen at international art fairs such as ARCO, Madrid, Material in Mexico City or Cross Roads in London. He has received different scholarships and grants for artistic creation such as the Aid for Plastic and Visual Arts of Navarra and the Creation Grant for the Provincial Council of Bizkaia.