Proyectos
NADA
We are experiencing a major movement with street art. It is certainly the reflection of our time: urban, since our lives are more and more centered around city life, and on walls as we spend more and more time in public spaces, meeting out of doors, or using public transport. Fragile and ephemeral too, like so many aspects of our lives, work and objects, sentiments and agreements.
Great artists use walls as a backdrop to express themselves, thus combining into a new art form both wall painting that has always existed since Lascaux and the transience of living art, born with the first dances. And so these walls offer us temporary masterpieces that disappear as day dawns.
The work of Catalan photographer Aleix Plademunt merits a closer look, and he shows here his Nada series that was created in a number of countries including China, Japan, the USA, Turkey, Greece and Mexico. The artist installed huge white canvases with nothing on them but the word Nothing in the local language, in order to denounce the commercialization of public spaces and words.
It is an aesthetical work and also a reflection on one of the major issues to face us in the future: how to preserve and extend a certain freedom, paragon of democracy as opposed to the domination of rarity, or let’s say the market? For, if this market invades everything, including the public spaces, the free spaces, does this mean that they no longer keep any meaning? This brings us to another broader question: is the market devoid of meaning? At the very least it tends to reduce the sense to the value, and the value to a price, as well as, progressively, each object, gesture, feeling or person to a price we consider to be fair. A price expressed in a certain currency, something transferable that has no real meaning.
The significance of this work lies in the fact that we are obliged to reflect on these two fundamental questions: the value of the market and the price of things, meaning and freedom. The meaning of freedom. Including the meaning of art.
Jacques Attali
2010
