PERFORADO POR ITZIAR OKARIZ Y SERGIO PREGO . PABELLÓN DE ESPAÑA, BIENAL DE VENECIA 2019

Every body inside an empty space generates a tension with the place where it is inserted, because the surrounding volume of the architecture returns the minimal materiality of the body. The main feature of the art of Itziar Okariz and Sergio Prego is a principle of immanence in this body-space relationship. Starting from an economy of means, they carry out an austere and forceful work, complex through simplicity. His works are characterized by elaborating forms and stripped images that participate in that will of transgression, of resistance, that Susan Sontag defined as “radical style”. In her essay “The Aesthetics of Silence” (1967), the author wrote that one of the most typical features of art of her time was transparency: “When we look at something that is ’empty’, we do not stop looking, We do not stop seeing something … even if it’s just the ghosts of our own expectations. In order to perceive fullness, we must preserve a sharp sense of the emptiness that delimits it; conversely, in order to perceive the void, other areas of the world must be captured as filled. ” However, in our present world, saturated with information and visuality, where the disembodied image that is not material prevails, transparency is a mere illusion. For this reason, removing the veils of representation represents a return to the material, the next.

The main gesture and outline in this exhibition consists of opening, widening the space from an “occupation” that in reality is its opposite, an unemployment or a voiding. Referring to John Cage, Sontag noted: “Silence does not only exist in a world populated by words and other sounds, but also any given silence enjoys its identity based on a stretch of time punctuated by sound.” To perforate is to partially pierce something, a thing, image or space, crossing it but letting glimpse what was in the first place, altering it in the act of perforation. This exhibition by Sergio Prego and Itziar Okariz is proposed as a perforation – in a metaphorical and literal sense – through actions, sound, image, sculpture and architecture. Because is not it the task of art to produce a hole in the real, an opening in space and time to investigate what was not there?