Ester Partegàs
- Artist Statement
- Curator Statement
- zingmagazine project
- Website
Artist Statement
As an artist, I am keenly interested in observing the way consumer society is increasingly affecting every aspect of our lives. The everyday has become a continuous challenge for the individual, who sees him/herself being unceasingly forced to re-signify and re-organize the most ordinary and common relations he/she has with the real world and, at the same time, with his/her notion of the self. A major role in this daily hecticness is played out by the media in all its different manifestations.
As a sympathetic response to the way public imagery is displayed around us, my art considers various systems of expression: drawings, objects, sculptures, projections, installations. Thus my drawings executed with clean, graphic lines and often traced from magazines and pictures emulate the images and messages of the media and its products. I distort and manipulate certain elements in order to create a subversive message/image that shows how social conducts are created and operate.
Like the drawings, my sculptures depict human and commodity shapes. Usually, these figures are placed directly on the floor, incorporating technological or branded objects in an isolated and alienated situation. These different sculptural devices are often off-scale, losing their real-life relationship to each other. Their aim moves from being a mere mirror of the material world to mirror the social world, questioning the strategies that hierarchize information.
The installations combine slide projections and sculptures, drawings or objects. All the works have a strong narrative aspect which is emphasized by the temporality effect of the projectors. I am very interested in the narration as a mechanism for fantasy, one that opens up new interior worlds and is able to transmit, share and “incorporate” the experiences of the viewer.
Ultimately, my work is about the fluctuations, negotiations, and contingencies the contemporary subject deals with in his/her struggle for constructing and consuming the representation of him/herself in this late-Capitalist, urban economy.
Curator Statement
Ester Partegàs’s Homeless is an exact replica of an airplane chair constructed entirely out of paper and Styrofoam, employing found disposables and emblazoned with corporate logos. Meant as a tribute to our transient lifestyles, the piece acts as a certain social commentary of a disposable society in which economy of use and purpose are as tantamount as image and identity. The title references a new phenomenon—modern corporate entrepreneurs globally navigating a commercial terrain—but nevertheless, alludes to the very polar opposite—the true “homeless”.
