Calle Espoz y Mina and calle Cruz
Madrid, Spain
July 2015
This project was made possible thanks to the City Council of Madrid, the French Institute of Madrid and especially Remedios.
Ministry of Culture
182, rue Saint Honoré, Paris, France
April 3rd – May 3rd 2015
Périmètre au Sol is the exact measurement of the line separating the public space from the private space around the Ministry of Culture building on Saint Honoré Street in Paris. I drew the generated line on four big papers (3,70 m x 1,40 m), each one representing one façade. The color code I used is two warm colors for the South and West façades and two cold colors for North and East.
Rudimentary Unidentified Frictional Object
Artmossphere Biennale
Moscow 09/2014
I have been doing research around the idea of “creating while walking” for a long time now (see the Promenades Project I did in Beijing: www.eltono.com/en/projects/promenades), my last idea was to register friction during a walk and I came up with the idea of RUFO – RUFO is a typical dog name in French and also the name of a toy dog that was released in the 80´s. I decided the four letters would stand for “Rudimentary Unidentified Frictional Object”.
Basically, I wanted to drag an artwork along a defined path and register the way it decays. I was doing tests around this idea when I was asked to participate in Artmossphere Biennial in Moscow so I decided to do the first RUFO experiment in the street of the Russian capital. I painted 11 wood boards with bold colored graphics and one by one dragged them around the city on different paths I had selected earlier (around the exhibition space, in random neighborhood, around the Red Square, around the hotel…). Each walk was between one and two kilometers, except for RUFO #9 where I walked for 2,5 kilometers and the painting almost disappeared entirely. Having the artwork interacting with the outside was crucial – showing artworks in the state they came out of the studio doesn’t interest me – my idea was to “print” the city onto each board turning them into witnesses of a walk, an experience. On the back of each board I showed the map of the walk and all the data generated (date, time, duration, distance and name of the streets wandered) – note that during the biennial, I showed reproductions of the back of the boards on spare boards for the people to understand better the story.
Pictures by Natalia Solovieva – Thanks to everybody at Artmosspere and to the people from Codered.
Moscow, Russia
September 2014
RUFO – Rudimentary Unidentified Frictional Object
I have been doing research around the idea of “creating while walking” for a long time now (see the Promenades Project I did in Beijing: www.eltono.com/en/projects/promenades), my last idea was to register friction during a walk and I came up with the idea of RUFO – RUFO is a typical dog name in French and also the name of a toy dog that was released in the 80´s. I decided the four letters would stand for “Rudimentary Unidentified Frictional Object”.
Basically, I wanted to drag an artwork along a defined path and register the way it decays. I was doing tests around this idea when I was asked to participate in Artmossphere Biennial in Moscow so I decided to do the first RUFO experiment in the street of the Russian capital. I painted 11 wood boards with bold colored graphics and one by one dragged them around the city on different paths I had selected earlier (around the exhibition space, in random neighborhood, around the Red Square, around the hotel…). Each walk was between one and two kilometers, except for RUFO #9 where I walked for 2,5 kilometers and the painting almost disappeared entirely. Having the artwork interacting with the outside was crucial – showing artworks in the state they came out of the studio doesn’t interest me – my idea was to “print” the city onto each board turning them into witnesses of a walk, an experience. On the back of each board I showed the map of the walk and all the data generated (date, time, duration, distance and name of the streets wandered) – note that during the biennial, I showed reproductions of the back of the boards on spare boards for the people to understand better the story.
Pictures by Natalia Solovieva – Thanks to everybody at Artmosspere and to the people from Codered.
Ongoing project
November 2013 – today
The Promenades Project is about walking, observation and spontaneity. It’s about wandering in the city with no pressure, no time limit, no goal apart from walking and enjoying it. It’s about walking with total freedom of time and space to be able to do all that things that you always want to do but you don’t because you have no time. It’s about moving crosscurrent in the city with time for contemplation to be able to observe details that most people don’t notice.
Rule #1: Walk and, if possible, create something on the way.
Rule #2: Only use material found during the walk – the only material I allow myself to bring is for
documentation (notebook, phone, camera) and a bag.
Rule #3: Only execute ideas created during the walk – or a predecessor walk.
Rule #4: Enjoy the walk.
This journal is a straight chronological transcription of what happened during each walk.
53 lines made of 5 points
Zestafoni, Georgia
October 15th – October 18th 2013
2,40 m. x 85 m.
This is the second time I ran this random wall painting experiment; it was executed for the first time – statically – in Bari, Italy and was called 8 Linee attraverso 4 Punti.
For this second attempt, the painting expanded to the right. Each line was made of 4 segments passing through 5 randomly positioned points on a plane (1,6 x 2,8 m. vertically centered on the wall). Once the X and Y coordinates were generated, the 5 points were marked on the wall, joined together from 1 to 5 and the segments were painted with one of the 8 randomly selected colors. Then the plane was moved 2/3 of its length to the right and the next set of segments was generated. In four days, we managed to paint 53 figures.
On going project – Eggshell stickers and fadeproof marker
