Retrotrabula is the title of the joint exhibition by the Catalan artist Perejaume (San Pol de Mar, 1957). The work has been created to be displayed at different times and in distant places from each other. As the artist himself notes, the display is a “territorial retable” understood as an extensive work, too wide to be grasped in a single glance. The work aims at synchronising, metaphorically, different spaces and moments, which will come together in a final publication. Being a wide net, extending in time and space, Retrotrabula tries to washout the physical boundaries of the museum in order to allow an artistic show that goes beyond geographical borders.

For each of the venues in which this geographical map is displayed - ARTIUM, Centro Jose Guerrero in Granada, Maison D'Erasme in Brussels and Cofradía de Pescadores (Fishermen Brotherhood) in San Pol de Mar- Perejaume has designed a different proposal regarding format and nature. The largest display within this project is the one shown in ARTIUM.

The genesis of the project presented in Vitoria, begins with the deliberation about the existing limits between a museum and the natural environment; more precisely, between ARTIUM and the Orixol mountain. To washout and cross the imaginary line between the two different, though not incompatible contexts, the artist shifts, connects and interrelates those two spaces. He does so by means of an artistic intervention in the mountain, which is subsequently materialised in the museum through the powerful presence of a grand sculpture entitled Cambra-Cambrils. This piece, invading the upper-eastern gallery, is shaped into a huge cylindrical wooden wall whose lower side adapts itself to the topographic profile of one of the summits of the mountain Orixol.

To accomplish this project, the artist measured in-situ the profile of the summit. Then, the piece was built in a workshop and placed in the mountain. The culminating moment of the intervention comes when the artistic piece and the mountain blend together. A photograph immortalising such moment was taken for its display in the museum. Once nature and art were connected, the enormous crown was removed and taken to Artium to be exhibited. Retrotrabula is completed with a selection of around sixty pieces including paintings, drawings photographs and sculptures. Works such as Cambra, Museographia, Els, Retaules, and arts ciutadanes, metaphorically transmit, on the one hand, the limits of the museum and how nature is being invaded by human's cultural intervention, and on the other, painting genre in itself, which for him is not just an instrument, but also a subject matter.

But, how can a place and a painting look alike? This could well be the staring point to understand Perjaumes's artistic universe, which is expressed through the relation between three different levels: representation, the world, and the spectator. The artist, in his endless search for new languages, sets out on a journey to the core of human being and his relationship with nature. In this way, the artist questions the fact that pictorial representations or landscape genre could lay hold of or replace memory or knowledge of places, which was often the purpose of artist in the past. Through interesting theory writings and a series of analytical variations on landscape, Perejaume contributes to redefining what landscape architecture is, setting up a new view to it. Through different means such as painting, photograph, video and action, without omitting writing, which is the fundamental clue to understand Perejaume's work, the artist questions the limits of representation, formats, artistic genres, language and even the limits of the museum space itself. He even goes as far as to creating new terms such as despintura, desescultura, oísmo, or pesebrismo. As a result of it, a poetic and suggestive work, sometimes ludicrous and ironic is revealed This oeuvre conceptually differs from the artistic references to which it could be connected, that is: nineteenth century landscape romantic tradition, Catalan historic avant-garde and Land art.

Discovering retrotrabula is both, perceiving a new landscape dimension, and feeling how words, images and our own view acquires a new sense.

Give back the earth its gold, the mountains its bronze, marble and ivory; only so, what we most lack today will be represented: the place where those elements came from.

Extract from La pintura i la boca, Perejaume