“Un estado salvaje. Windows Crashing” is the first individual exhibition of french artist Guillaume Cabantous (Paris 1977) in Spain. The exhibition is presented at Jorge López Galería with a comprehensive exhibition setup, which understands the interior space as an extension of the artist's support.
Cabantous' works are made with car windshields, as iconic consumer objects; as an analogy about the speed of our society. In this era of instant communication, multiple tasks and the deliberate disappearance of the borders between the physical world and the existing digital projection, a nervous and crazy mimesis is produced towards the memory of the landscape, a convergence to overcome the limits of contemporary speed . “Un estado salvaje. Windows Crashing” is a trip through a window at 180km per hour through a car glass, where the primacy of invisible space is superimposed over the visible in a collision with matter.
The end of a cycle and the transformation of a new one. A window at full speed where we see the world in motion to distort it, divide it and refocus it. A car window, which frustrates the memory of a landscape; scenes disintegrated into a mosaic of crystals like pixels that unite speed and materiality.
“Un estado salvaje. Windows Crashing” is an allegory to the contemporary world, where the image is a liquid concept, where themes are lost and fragmented into patterns, as if they translated digital images into a memory. Windows of reality transformed by a shock, a blow that bends them and shows us the crudeness, violence and fragility of our environment.
His work presents a dramatic effect present in the way he uses glass, an eternal material with magical characteristics. The artist breaks it with blows to transform it but in the end, it will always be what it was: a window, a windshield where you can see reality in motion.
The poverty of the materials reminds us of Arte Povera, but loaded with speed, updated, contemporized after a carefully studied gesture. Guillaume works with the accident, with the rupture and the fold, he represents the mythical failure of an aggressive society like a pile of modeled broken glass, discreetly dangerous but pleasantly sad. From its movement, its nature to its reactions, nothing is left to chance, it plays with the material to confuse us in the illusion of lightness and flexibility, banal and abrupt masses of glass. Fine and primitive at the same time.
Dystopias always seem utopian at first; everything is broken but still hopeful, transformation and change is reversible.