Joan Pallé. Els joves infeliços. Curated by Sjors Bindels

Els joves infeliços is a solo exhibition by Joan Pallé that examines contemporary youth through tensions between awareness and powerlessness, attraction and rejection, exposure and concealment. Taking as its point of departure Pier Paolo Pasolini’s text Il giovani infelici (1975), the project reflects on a generation that inherits the social, political and economic consequences of its predecessors.

Through a set of new works combining different media, scales and visual registers, Pallé builds a dense, rhythmically charged environment in which humour and irony coexist with a critical gaze on consumer culture, social media and emotional precarity. The exhibition stages a youth that is aware of the mechanisms that make it unhappy, yet often unable to transform them—caught between lucidity and paralysis.

Joan Pallé (Lleida, 1989) lives and works in Barcelona. His practice is marked by a versatile, figurative approach that connects critical theory, popular culture and autobiographical experience. Working with drawing, painting, sculpture and installation, Pallé constructs situations of tension between artwork, viewer and context, dismantling binary readings of identity, power and representation. His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at art centres and institutions nationally and internationally, consolidating a critical voice attuned to the contradictions of the present.