Cúmul. Pep Duran
Original minds are not distinguished by being the first to see a new thing, but instead by seeing the old, familiar thing that is overlooked as something new.” Friedrich Nietzsche
Since his earliest exhibitions Pep Duran Esteva has always cultivated collage as a tool for interpreting the world. He is prominent among those artists who insisted upon the essence of collage: building from fragments. The artist treats collage as if it were a stage score. All kinds of scraps, photographs, papers, cardboards, wood, have been his recurring materials. His works have a pronounced and specific theatricality in which the resulting images are like a large kaleidoscope or palimpsest, which he assembles according to the space.
In this new exhibition, the artist starts with some artworks from 2004-2006 in which he used small fragments of photographs from his archive while building clusters of images and unreal landscapes, which today constitutes this continuum that unfolds through the exhibition space; a graphic accumulation, a wordless novel, a large collage. Cúmul, comprises artworks which were exhibited between 2004-2006 under the name of Endurance at the Alejandro Sales (2006) gallery in Barcelona. Also creating a pretext for introducing collages made from old paper theatre sets, Papers d’Ombra, recently exhibited at the Museu Can Framis/Fundació Vila Casas in Barcelona ( 2024), insisting on the concept of a pile, of a fragmentation, of an accumulation of images. And it is also connected with the artist’s exhibition in Vic entitled Teatres Buits in 1996.
The artworks in the exhibition are a chronicle, a frieze, a diary which the artist has been continuously creating; silent sequences in which the characters and their shadows move like presences rescued from old films.
In Cúmul, apart from showing the entire repertoire of photo collages, Pep Duran Esteva treats the exhibition hall as a stage in which the viewer finds small scenes, dialogues, or open monologues.
In parallel with the exhibition at ACVIC, the artist will stage a temporary installation of three sculptural pieces in the Albergueria space, three fixed tables, which invite reflection while connecting with the memory of the place.
