2018

Lluís Hortalà: Encore un moment, monsieur le bourreau…

F2 Galería

[In brief summary…]

Lluís Hortalà finds in the 18th-century Versailles and in the crisis of the Ancien Régime the best examples to examine the artifices which require the power to consolidate itself.

Marie Antoinette and Madame du Barry’s vanity as well as the impact of their personal squabbles on the European diplomacy of the time were the subject of Hortalà’s previous solo exhibition, named ‘Il y a bien du monde aujourd’hui à Versailles’ (‘There is a lot of people here at Versailles’), (Rocío Santacruz, 2016.)

Today, Hortalà, with ‘Encore un moment, monsieur le bourreau, encore un moment’ (‘One moment more, executioner, one little moment’), presents a roccoco tragicomedy in three acts, where together with the courtesans, there are new actors, who co-exist in a temporary regime, oddly concurrent: The first act sends back to the sumptuous art and explains how it found, with the arrival of the museum, the guillotine, which extinguished its world. The second act refers to the ornamental strategy and clarifies how to deceive the eye is a sample of the deepest sincerity among objects and humans. Eventually, in a third act, it also appears the artifice, which exhibits itself in its literalism, deprived and torn apart. It is a sort of zero degree of artifice that finds its origin, at the beginning and at the end of this show.

Lluís Hortalà was born in Olot (Spain) in 1959. He works and lives in Barcelona (Spain). Along his professional career, he has exhibited in galleries as well as museums and European foundations like Le Carré (Nîmes, France), Delfina Studio (London, United Kingdom), BombasGens Centre d’Art (Valencia, Spain), CDAN (Huesca, Spain), Arts Santa Mónica (Barcelona, Spain) or the Fundaçâo Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon, Portugal), among others. His works are part of important national and international collections: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain), Colección Fundació “La Caixa” (Barcelona, Spain), Colección Artim (Vitoria, Spain), Col·lecció Per Amor l’Art (Valencia, Spain), Fundación Marcelino Botín (Santander, Spain), Trust Fundation (Washington DC, USA), Colección Fundació Banc de Sabadell (Barcelona, Spain).