LUIS VIDAL

And he has returned with a work that is as absolute and vital as ever, with his usual weapons: irony, humour and bad blood... and now using two new techniques: ceramics andtext. Vidal introduces us through this exhibition into a surreal, grotesque world, full ofmyths, where we recognise his usual fears. His hands are now stained with clay and ink,as much as they used to have paint and bronze dust.

Vidal is an artist who calls the demons, brings them closer to us to put them under theprism of light, thus taking them out of the dark craters of the walls..... He wants us tosee them face to face, as they are and not as we imagine them in our minds when we areovercome by fear.

Vidal is a bittersweet artist. He makes you feel in each work fear and calm, laughter andfear, the salt and sugar of life in each one of his pieces or phrases.

Text and ceramics seem two complex elements to combine what is understood as success today, but the artist has never pursued it in a straight line, direct way. He has ratherbeen an elliptical man who has preferred the distance to see how his followers approachhim and not the opposite.

Vidal returns with a brutal force, a surprising and unknown technical skill, together withan intellectual sharpness and clear and direct humour.His oeuvre, after this presentation of a new world, climbs up a step further... He tells us: ‘come closer, look at it closely and find in it all my fears, my weapons and my surprises’.Nobody will remain unharmed, nobody will leave the same after his visit, nobody willthink that his work is unimportant... Because all his work is based on the opposite, ontranscendence, depth, on finding some truth in a form, in a word, or a look.

Born in Barcelona in 1970. He is one of the Spanish artists with the greatest internationalprojection. He has exhibited in Germany, Denmark, Canada, Brazil and the USA. His work,located between social commitment and the most innovative artistic configurations, revolves around socially controversial issues.

Projects such as Umbilical Meninos (2001) have marked a very unconventional personal trajectory. Luis Vidal moves with ease in the fields of sculpture, installation, leatherengraving and drawing; he also circulates his work in the most prestigious museums andinternational galleries. However, his work has not strayed from that irritating subversivequality, walks his own path without being trapped in the cogs of the elite of collectors orart critics. Vidal is endowed with a more global perspective on the harsh reality that surrounds us. Life–in all its inner violence, corruption and endless struggle between goodand evil–is channeled in his installations not as a consecrated, provocative formalism,but as an emotional experience under construction, which is, therefore, capable of beingcontemplated by the viewer with the necessary critical detachment.