There’s something both bizarre and magical in abandoned places. The course of time invades them, colonizes them, makes it into its own. The invisible imprints impregnate the walls and the experiential trace of past inhabitants slips through the cracks like winter would through a badly insulated window.
Places where there was life before, or in this particular case, places prepared especially to welcome life.
Grip Face knows it well and that’s precisely where the attraction of its works outside the studio lies in; shaping this inherent magnetism in the uninhabited, increasing it, transforming it, or even- always with a set intention obviously-making it disappear.
In #NRFH, plastics, residues and debris proper to our condition, coexist along with a fauna and a flora that never rest in their own development, penetrating the rooms, expanding through the wooden walls and generating breaches in the floors of what could have been a small Scandinavian urbanization.
The predictable failure of a real estate business specialized in wooden houses in an isolated, warm and dry area provides the opportunity to Grip Face to submerge itself, for a given period of time, into a constant reflexion.
The study of the area allows it to bridge two working lines, the abstract and the figurative, generally blending them as it sees fit, and, with a lot of expertise always.
Nothing is trivial; the colour range of the interventions belongs to the bottles, cans and wrappings that carpet the ground of houses backyards. Vibrating colours that haven’t lost their intensity over the years and, the mask and the costume, always so present in its works, dress its dwellers inside their homes, with the intention of driving away possible intruders.
These inhabitants without a name remain fearless in front of the looming imminent collapse, each one with his respective role.
The totemic image of the hunter, both protector and spectator of the wild restocking of nature, and that of the villager, smoking an industrial cigarette-symbol of an alien civilization-almost with a disgusted face. Both are the true guardians of the territory.
NOT RENTED TO HUMANS, painted on one of the walls of the facade, is the first thing one would read along the path through the weeds. The title of the project highlights the artist’s declaration of intention, the expression of his wish as well as his plea to a collective self-reflection, always from an ironic starting point, in order to remind us again and again as to where we’re heading.
Texto complete en inglés recibido.
