Exhibitions

Venue: Westlondonprojects, London

Dates: 26th April–28th May 2006

‘On any day of the year it is summer somewhere in the world’

In the celebrated documentary ‘The Endless Summer’ (1966), Bruce Brown followed two surfers around the globe in their quest for the perfect wave. Shot on 16-millimeter film, with post-synchronized sound, it captures a short-lived period in American popular culture. This proudly unpolished movie became synonymous with hardcore surfing, youthful freedom and nomadic attitude.

In the same way, this group of artists uses a series of signs where different languages and cultures are intertwined in a continuous redefinition of the concept of form. These heterogeneous shapes will be redefined and expanded as an extensive reservoir underneath the canonical levels, regardless of the codified structures.

The various elements associated together are always presented as a completely new starting point in which their origin is unimportant. This interaction of visual references creates a simultaneity of shapes in which the relationship with geometry does not represent a determined form; it is not about a systemisation of it that is more valid than others. The original module can be seen as a preliminary constriction of formal nature; a stance that points to the charm of the rule in its equidistance between constraint and freedom.

In working with vernacular aesthetics all the artists play with the line between the staged and the un-staged; the action or event, inducing an audience into a position of uncertainty. Despite their varied cultural backgrounds, the artist’ works share the ambiguity of apparent beauty laced with an ironic subversion; the often attractive and skilfully rendered artwork at second sight reveals an insurgent edge.

The Endless Summer offers a turbulent view, where no phenomenon can be seen to develop in a simple linear, progressive or hierarchical manner; building chaos into forms supposed to be stable. All their different praxis and attitudes are related to the concept of ‘abstract matter’, which rather than being constituted in fixed entities, is made up of movements, of endless crossing and re-crossing of lines of stratification. It represents a living organism, a fluid network of signs, the matrix and result of a series of codes in which each artist inserts his own.