EXPOS

ESTHER FERRER

Works Presentation Artists Press Download

“Within the frame, art’s framework” – For sale, furnished.

Decoration ? A camouflage operation? A visual equivalent of “wallpaper music”? A prank in the manner of Satie? Those white mirrors, tinged with irony, those molded rifts, those rococo oriel windows enhanced by flowers framing a perfect geometry and made up of successive frames, making and unmaking the art of framing… and the framework of art, that of surrogate paintings, of tautological art; they provide a humor in the fashion of Kolkoz and other companies.
We all know that to frame a frame is to produce a signifier; on that subject, Vitruvius noted that the Caryatides are bowed down under the temples’ architraves, in order to remind the Caryats that it was dangerous to rise up against Greece, it was a memo. The Van Eyck brothers pushed Adam out from the “Mystical Lamb altar piece” – his foot is poised along the edge, midway between real space and fictional space – in order to bear witness to an embodied story. Under Napoleon the Third, the frames were used to glorify the official art or to allow one to ignore it. Leaping over centuries, the frame gave meaning, thinking about the frame for Fluxus is an invitation to exit it, to break down the barriers between disciplines. An instigator of that culture, John Cage also influenced Zaj[1], he interacted with the group like a devilish catalyzer and he invited one to discover sound, silence, action, by letting the event, the sound and the fury take its course. Art and life were within the same frame, off-camera.
Every ornament has a function. So, frames framing frames? that frame bits of wall? or others, from which there emerges raw matter: string, metal, springs, plastic? So much care taken with “wrapping up” is perhaps a commitment to the preciousness of its content, signifying that all surroundings may perhaps have a magical component. This exhibition would overplay the artifice, in order to rethink the real, its magic; could it be the gallery of that Brilliant Republic pregnant with Dada humor, made up of bits of strings, and scraps of wood?
The interpretation remains open, an opera aperta, an opportunity to be seized in the Galerie Lara Vincy within the framework of… the Esther Ferrer exhibition.

Francine Flandrin, march 2009 - Translated in English by Ann Cremin

[1]Esther Ferrer carried out many performances within the ZAJ group until its dissolution in 1996. Created in 1964 by three figures from the music world: Juan Hidalgo, Walter Marchetti and Ramon Barce, - the three of them very influenced by John Cage’s research – that group brought together multidisciplinary and anti-Franquist artists.

Biographical notes :

Born in 1937 in San Sebastian, Spain.
Lives and works in Paris.

She is particularly well known for her performances, her main form of expression, alone or with the Zaj group, with Juan Hidalgo and Walter Marchetti.
Her work has always been turned more towards art/action, an ephemeral action, rather than towards art/production. That was how she founded, along with the painter J.A.Sistiaga, in early sixties Spain, the first Free Expression workshop. But it was at the start of the seventies that she devoted some of her activity to the visual arts : worked over photographs, installations, objects and paintings based on the series of primary numbers.
Her work is placed within a very unusual minimalist context, which could be described as the « rigorousness of the absurd ». She says, but only when asked, that all performance is « an art of space, time and presence ».
In 1999, she represented Spain in the Venice Biennale.

This year she won the National Prize for Visual Arts awarded by the Ministry of Culture in Spain.