Galería FORMATO COMODO

ARTIST: PAULA RUBIO INFANTE. ENTRE PECHO Y ESPALDA- Project - CANVAS, MIXED MEDIA, 41 X 34 cm., 2007. The Project consists of a long series of paintings, drawings and collages in which the work’s two main elements, armchairs and Spanish greyhounds, establish similarities and parallels of a metaphoric kind between both.

Among chest and back

In her exhibition Among chest and back Paula Rubio has proceeded to use intense pictorial formats and a wide variety of techniques in which she takes representation of greyhounds (with carnality and a very powerful speech) next to photographs, as the reproduced images diverted to the media of torture by U.S. soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. The ensemble is completed by the parallel projection of two videos. One of them takes an assembly with an annoying sound (in wich the manipulation of a pasodoble, Sighs of Spain, it’s recognizable), images recorded in a kennel where dogs were collected, greyhounds abandoned by their hunters, if not torture - when they are already useless, for example, in hunting hares. The animals are then hunger, sick and some of them show unmistakable signs of brutal treatment by their former masters. The second video, without sound, shows the process by which some upholsterers professionally dismantled an armchair in perfect condition made of skin, obeying an artist’s decision. The thoroughness of workers reveals the structure and inner parts that in any way becomes elegant, despite the ostentatious appearance of the object. The close projection of both videos leads the viewer to imagine uncomfortably taking out the skin of greyhounds, which is not the case in reality, as in Stachka (The strike, 1924) by Sergei Eisenstein, the representation of suppression of the rebels is not shown but we see a juxtaposition of images with a scene of animal carnage, a cow butchered in a slaughterhouse for human consumption, although both sequences projected consecutively melt through a very effective resolution (and not shortly discussed) of the film edition in the imagination of the viewer to create a frightening effect. On the other hand, the collective Team Reality - formed by the painters Jordi Ballester and Joan Cardells - active during the last decade of Franco, had already united in the series "Home sweet home" (1972-1973) in the same pictorial representation two elements Paula Rubio has incorporated too, the couch and the dog, in his dual video, as a way of showing an acid and visually annoying two distinctive that have served to identify the bourgeoisie. If in the work of Team Reality this composition was used as an illustration of the social breakdown of Franco’s Spain, in which all human element disappeared as something sinister, in the work of Paula Rubio, this union, which is never real, but only targeted, refers in a direct way to the violence.

Finally, the destruction of Paula Rubio is not accompanied by the introduction of a new order, but the action is not devoid of symbolism almost fetishist. In one of his performances on various chairs (one of them, that belonged to the artist’s father, painter, at his home, was burned in a sports club), Paula Rubio has proceeded with the introduction into the empty space that has left the armchair, as a shell, on the inside for what she has used the abandoned remains on the sand by the suffered crew of a boat on their arrival to the Almeria coast.