21 February–12 April 2014
Galería Elba Benítez
C/ San Lorenzo, 11
28004, Madrid
Spain
The Elba Benítez Gallery in Madrid is pleased to announce the exhibition of work by Mario García Torres. The exhibition will open February 21, coinciding with ARCOmadrid.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is Xoco, the Kid Who Loved Being Bored (cont.), a 16mm animated film projected onto the wall of the gallery, accompanied by painted backgrounds of the type used by professional animators and that are likewise exhibited on the gallery walls. Xoco has been a recurring character in García Torres’s recent work with film and artist books. Xoco’s outstanding trait is that he does next to nothing; in Xoco’s world, nothingness possesses a Zen-like open-endedness, and boredom is embraced as emancipatory. But here, in the animated film Xoco, the Kid Who Loved Being Bored (cont.), the projection frame becomes the true exhibition site; and when juxtaposed in the mind of the viewer with the various painted backgrounds distributed throughout the gallery, Xoco’s navigation of and negotiation with the site takes on a wealth of possible interpretations. As a result, Xoco serves as an emblem of the exhibition process itself, and of its crucial function within the construction of artistic meaning. Xoco himself may do next to nothing; but that is not to say that next to nothing happens.
The exhibition also includes the animated film The Remains of a Never-seen-by-the-artist animation. Composed of found footage that García Torres gathered from the cutting-room leftovers in an animation studio, The Remains visually recalls experimentally abstract films of the ’60s and ’70s. But at the same time, by breathing new life into what has been left over and discarded, it also displays García Torres’s signature method of making use, literally and metaphorically, of art history, and in the process of looping the apparent stasis of the past into the kinetically ongoing present. Finally, the exhibition includes another animated film created by García Torres titled 21 Attempts at Drawing a Perfect Circle (One After the Other, Every Two Frames, Mixed, Looped, Jumbled Up, Scrambled and Looped Again.).
The research-driven work of Mario García Torres (b. 1975, Mexico) includes photographic presentations, conceptual installations and language-based pieces, and frequently revisits the overlooked interstices in the art of recent generations. This is his second exhibition at the Elba Benítez Gallery.
