MONUMENTA / SPOLIO

Description

BORONDO – Monumenta / Spolio

Spray, bitumen, acrylic, and oil on aluminum plate
100 x 200 cm, 2022

Not Available

Artist info

Borondo

Gonzalo Borondo was born in Valladolid (ES) in 1989. Since 2007, he has developed his works in public spaces, elaborating an original idiom of painting and installations closely tied to the sites of his efforts. His art arises from a dialogue with the surrounding context, an ongoing exchange with the memories of the site and the perceptions of its space, both physical and symbolic. The underlying aim of his artistic experimentation is to extend the possibilities of painting into other disciplines (theatre, video-art), supports (glass, straw, walls, ceramics, wood…), and multiple aesthetic techniques (stone engraving, silk-screening). Borondo explores the idioms of the past, recasting them in a contemporary light through a new and innovative approach to tradition.  His contemplation of the sacred, of the conflicts inherent in the pairing of man and nature, serves as the cornerstone of his poetics, which he uses to break these elements down, in the course of the creative act, into their most ancestral, instinctive forms, bringing forth a perpetual essence. The artist’s interest in working in public places, in exploring the relationship between art and life, has led him to develop site-specific projects in non-conventional settings, works whose impact on the general public, as both installations and experiences, has been intense. Borondo creates public works of art on an international level. Since 2012 he has held one-man shows in museums, galleries, and other venues in Italy, Spain, France, and England. His latest projects include “Insurrecta” (Segovia, ES, 2020), “Merci” (Temple des Chartrones, Bordeaux, FR, 2019), “Sacrilége” (an opera recital at the Toursky Theatre, Bordeaux, FR, 2018), “Matiére Noire” (the flea market in Marseilles, FR, 2017), “Non-Plus Ultra” (MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, IT, 2018) and “Cenere” (the cemetery chapel, Selci, IT, 2017).

More info

What is a monument?

The term “monument” comes from the Latin monere and indicates a “sign that was placed and that remains in the memory of a person or of an event”.

A monument represents the architectural exposition of a message, of an ideology, or of a thought. Its physical matter is infused with a meaning related to a certain time or place. A monument is erected to celebrate a moment and to last forever, which is an intrinsic contradiction in terms.

This contradiction also extends to the urban fabric to which the monument belongs. As Aldo Rossi writes, each city finds its image, its essence, and its memory through “the contrast between what is specific and what is universal and between the individual and the collectivity”, and therefore through the relationship between what is eternal and what may change, between the “urban facts” that structure it.

Gonzalo Borondo questions people’s need to perpetuate themselves and their vision of things by imposing their presence on their surroundings. This translates into their compulsion to leave an indelible mark. But the context and the society they belong to are instead characterized by eternal change, which cyclically encounters the urge to oppose what remains unalterable.

Like the roots of a tree, a monument reminds us every day of our history and keeps us immobile, anchored to the land we were born in, in a time that is not ours and in a static condition that does not belong to us.

The destruction of a monument, be it physical or ideological, thus becomes the medium and the symbol for a revolution that establishes the breaking point necessary for evolution.

“Monumenta” springs from this inexhaustible relationship of dependence and conflict: a series of paintings on aluminum plates through which Borondo speaks to us of rupture and reconciliation, of inertia and change, of all eternal antinomies.