Distància Zero (Zero Distance)

Having spent several years in Cologne and Paris, in 1992 Pep Agut was selected by Manel Clot for the exhibition Historia natural. El doble hermético (Natural History: The Hermetic Double). He participated in several group exhibitions organised by José Luis Brea, such as Los últimos días (The Last Days) in 1992 and Iluminaciones profanas, la tarea del arte (Profane Illuminations: The Task of Art) in 1993. He belongs to a generation of artists including Ignasi Aballí, Salomé Cuesta and José Maldonado, who took a radical approach to the question of artistic experience itself and the limits of representation.

As the artist explained, ‘Many of the artists who emerged at that time found an open door for debate. The piece Distància Zero lent its title to the exhibition that José Luis Brea curated at the Santa Monica Art Centre in 1994, Años 90. Distancia cero (The 1990s: Zero Distance). It summarised my research during those years, focussing on the issue of representation that is central to my work’. The central feature it shares with the pieces in Brea’s critical environment is that, in addition to representing itself — a sheet of acrylic crushing a white canvas — it meanwhile reflects the process of experience and interpretation that viewers make of it since the reflective surface causes them to see themselves. As Brea explained, ‘the attempt to reach the ground zero of meaning, in an e!ort to establish the link between symbol-referent or between signifier-signified’, gives rise to a work that in itself is a closure of the indices of representation.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio