To gravitate, from Latin gravitas (“weight”), is a verb that always refers to a three-dimensional form, to the attraction and influence that one body exerts on another. However, in Patrik Grijalvo’s work we encounter a game of gravitation whose actors have, curiously enough, a two-dimensional nature. Pieces of photographs that are suspended one above the other and flirt, from the emptiness that inhabits the work, with the limits of sculptural language. In Gravitación Visual the border between photography and sculpture is blurred, and a dialogue is generated between the two disciplines based on a third artistic language: architecture.

The titles of the works decode the familiar architectures that the viewer’s eyes, at first sight, fail to identify. Always taking architectural photography as the basis of his artistic creation, in the following exhibition Grijalvo takes a step further in his research and focuses his practice on the deconstruction of the concept of museum. This sought-after deconstruction, result of a desire to make it difficult to identify the work, responds to an exercise of appropriation of the museum, its architecture and its author. Patrik Grijalvo thus questions the limits of the museum, both as content and container, in creations that become timeless, like the immutable buildings from which they are born.

Being a native of Bilbao and, therefore, a witness of the transformation that the city underwent as a result of the erection of the Guggenheim, he has first-hand awareness of the tension that can be generated between art and architecture. A tension with which he infuses his most recent works and which he uses to rethink and explore the concept of museum. We become thus witness to a deconstruction of the museum that not only fragments its forms and reformulates them, but also transcends the conceptual plane and explores the future of these institutions. How does the architecture of a museum condition the works that we find inside of it? What is the interest of this institution regarding the audience?

Alba Alarcos Veiga