SQUARE
Galería Pep Llabrés (Mallorca, Spain)
Sep 14 – Nov 30, 2022
Square, David Magán’s first exhibition project for the Pep Llabrés gallery, focuses on the three-dimensional understanding of the sculptural object. This concept, which Magán has researched and developed throughout his entire career, is based on the idea of taking sculpture’s three-dimensionality to its maximum consequences, introducing colour, transparency and light. A journey, one might say, dedicated to exploring ideas about the fourth dimension in sculpture.
The exhibition’s pivotal concept –the three-dimensional understanding of the sculptural object– is worked through three vertebrate elements that Magán explicitly presents to the viewer, and in which the procedural is central. Firstly, the mathematical idea of the square, emphasised by the title of the exhibition itself. Secondly, the square as a compositional, constructive and aesthetic element, present in all the works. And finally, the juxtaposition of the three-dimensional object with free two-dimensional representations of it, contrasting the fiction of the representation on the pictorial plane with the real object; questioning the ability to represent through drawing, painting or photography, the sculptural reality in all of its experience.
David Magán’s sculpture draws closer Gestalt’s visual perception theories, thanks to his juxtaposition of simple and primary elements –such as geometry, the plane and a restrictive use of colour– with the rich, complex, ambiguous and dual nature of transparency and light. What is more, his strategy for presenting works and the importance he attaches to the literalness of the sculptural object and material use, approximates this body of work to Minimalism’s postulates. This exhibition takes on a more intimate tone and launches a series of projects that seek to analyse and emphasise Magán’s recently developed ideas and research, it is a sort of a look back and recapitulation, which, nevertheless, speaks through his most contemporary practice.
This intimacy comes after some of his most relevant and expansive projects for example: In Praise of Shadows. As Quintas (La Caridad, Asturias, Spain, 2022); Immaterial Architectures. Francisco Sobrino Museum (Guadalajara, Spain, 2021); Light Object. Cayón Gallery (Madrid, 2021); Hard-line. Cayón Gallery (Madrid, 2021); Matter Matters. CAB (Burgos, Spain, 2020); and Behind the Wall. XIII Havana Biennial (Cuba, 2019).
