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Gerardo Armesto (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 1949) presents works made on video between 1981 and 1990 in this exhibition. Alongside these pieces –a great deal of which have recently entered the Museum’s collection of works– several sketchbooks, models and sculptural objects relate his production to theoretical developments and analyses on perception in a consistent manner. The exhibition aims to be a new case study in the Collection project Zeru bat, hamaika bide. Artistic Practices in the Basque Country in the Period 1977-2002.
Armesto’s work during the 1980s and early 1990s focused on studying audiovisual processes. The analysis of perception and the interrelation between position, colour, lights and volumes in space, applied to the exercise of teaching, were the catalyst that widened his interest in the moving image in his work. As Francisco Ruiz de Infante, a workshop partner during that decade, indicates: “Being a pioneer allows you to play with errors and lived experience in real time. Do colour, shadow and light create volumes? Yes! Is the cube also a medium for expression? And the face? Of course! Simulacra are always expressive skins thanks to light”.
The exhibition encompasses 8 key audiovisual pieces, reference works in the use of animated images during the period of transition from analogue medium to digital creation. Taking centre stage in these, alongside technical innovation, are point of view, geometric projection and medium, whose precise, concrete and defined nature transport us to a consolidated, unreal construction, while a restless, moving point of view returns back to us the deformed, complex image of reality.
After his early work in painting, the analysis of the perception of form, colour and light applied to the exercise of teaching led to works such as La elección del soporte, 1981, which won an award at the National Video Festival in Madrid, and later animation pieces developed both analogically and through digital experimentation. Disfraces para un cubo II, one of the first moving image works in the exhibition, was included in La imagen sublime, a benchmark exhibition on emerging video creation in Spain organised at MNCARS in 1987.
