I burst with laughter. I die of sadness

CarrerasMugica is pleased to present, from March 5th March to May 7th, I BURST WITH LAUGHTER I DIE OF SADNESS, Txomin Badiola’s third solo exhibition at the gallery after TOO CLOSE TO IGNORE, TOO FAR FOR ONE TO INTERVENE held in 2015.

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They are nine sculptures, though some of them don’t look like it, two of them made of various freestanding units. The one that gives its name to the exhibition is made up of five elements that come from another one made five years ago. Each one is independent, although taken together they form a kind of poem: I DIE WITH LAUGHTER OF SADNESS I BURST I BURST I DIE I BURST WITH LAUGHTER OF SADNESS I DIE. Ardor y manía (Ardour and Mania) is at once a three-dimensional version of previous ones and a reorganization of elements from a piece from eleven years ago. In the gravedigger’s monologue in Hamlet, the prince finds the remains of the court jester and laments (“Alas poor Yorick!”) that someone who embodied happiness, joie de vivre, jesting and jokes, has been reduced to a dirty, abhorrent skull. Alas poor Andre makes use of two pieces of news—here turned into posters (produced eleven years ago for another project) glimpsed between a collapsing architecture—in which two people (one of who is Andre) on dying left their own skulls to two theatres so that they could use them in the scene of the famous monologue on the vanity of life. Bastardos blancos (White Bastards) are four pieces that recall another four from the previous exhibition but at a point of increasing evanescence. Monumento y De los Udam (Monument and On the Udams) are countermonuments at the service of an improbable posterity. Flujos, mutaciones, filiaciones (Flows, Mutations, Affiliations) is a piece that did not make the cut for the last exhibition because it was waiting for this one, its rightful place. Winckelmann and Lessing are two figures from the Enlightenment who knew that art could well be the unconsciousness of history. Malevich created an icon with an internally torn serenity, the beginning and end, alpha and omega. In No me tendrás por inocente (Don’t think I’m innocent) these images (begun twelve years ago) are inadvertently structured around a funeral artefact. Finally, Esos desechos is literally just that, those remnants, a series of discards from different periods put to work in their will to exist.

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