Xavier Soto

Residency period: December 2019 – January 2020

It’s only time (December 2019)

The intervention deals with time and space, through color.

The experimentation with the pictorial material and its search for the memory contained in the facades of the buildings has led him to question the idea of conventional representation and the paintings format.

The project, framed within site-specific art, breaks the rules of pictorial technique by materializing the work in direct contact with space.

The action is to disassemble the canvas from the frame to reduce it to its fabric with which he cleans the facades of the old town, trapping in tissue the texture, color, and other events inscribed on those walls.

In this gesture, hours, days, experiences are rescued, resulting in a series of abstract works in which painting is nothing more than the imprint of time.

No solo tiempo (Not only time) (January 2020)

The search for the memory contained in the Spaces, through pictorial experimentation, has led Xavier to question the conventional idea of ​​representation.

Soto disassembles each canvas of its frame, reducing it to its fabric and cleans with each of them a facade of the historic center of Blanca. In this way, he captures the texture, the different layers of color and other occurred events. Finally, the fabric is mounted on the frame again.

With this gesture, Xavier does not represent memory through pictorial reproduction, but rather presents the materiality that makes up the skin of these buildings.

The places are witnesses of time and they hold personal, social, and political  history;  the surfaces are permeated borders of the life that happens around, and this work turns the canons of representativeness as well as creates a new way to generate a narrative.

For these open studios, the result of the pieces described is presented as an installation, in which he brings his tracks through the historical center of Blanca, as well as its materiality. 

The drawings on the floor are configured with a “chalk” made by him with the organic elements he has found in his walks (stones, earth, leaves), with which he draws a map where to install the different elements of the process

In this way, it poses to the attendees to reproduce symbolically  his physical and mental paths as a way to share the creative process of the artist.