Counterpoint

Sergi Aguilar

From the outset of his career in the early 1970s, Sergi Aguilar (Barcelona, 1946) has pursued a photographic practice that ran in parallel with his productions in the field of sculpture.

These images can today be viewed as a profound inquiry into some of the central issues that have preoccupied the artist. For example, emptiness or sutures in the landscape, the buildings whose barest volumes he portrays, framing that isolates and determines, and the tensions between appearance, seriality and presence.

Counterpoint takes its title from Don DeLillo’s book of the same name, which was published in the now defunct Grand Street magazine in 2004. The essay investigates three films: Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988); Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993) and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), as well as Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser (1983) and an old photograph by Robert Parent showing Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus and Roy Haynes performing at the Open Door in New York in 1953.

The exhibition brings together for the first time in monographic form an exhaustive selection of photographs and various audiovisual works. Its museographic presentation questions the spatial hierarchies and codifications that determine certain ways of looking at images. By contrast, it proposes a visual experience that is more akin to that which occurs in an artist’s studio, or even in old photographic developing rooms or film editing suites.