There Are Other Things

Thrsday tot Saturday 12.00 -17.00

JOEY RAMONE is proud to open the season with the 1st solo exhibition at the gallery by Barcelona based artist Bernat Daviu (1985, Fonteta). The exhibition entitled There Are Other Things opens on Saturday 9 September, 16.00 – 19.00hrs and runs till 4 November 2023.

The interest in what happens outside the work, what escapes and will escape the artist's control, is what triggers the works presented in this exhibition. Anecdotal elements, apparently disconnected from the works of art, acquire a high symbolic potential when they enter into dialogue with them. It is these elements that the artist has chosen to weave a story that runs along the fine line between what is intentional and what is accidental, the result of a certain place and time.

Daviu is interested in the Monochrome, a milestone in the history of Western modern art of the 20th century. Its 'pure' abstraction has proclaimed both the end of art and the beginning of a new paradigm, a new beginning of it all. The idea of an uncertain end or a new beginning is similar in the old paintings that the artist recovers. Paintings that have not been sold at auctions or that are crying out for a new chance at flea markets before they are surely destroyed. Monochromes that become the background of events unrelated to them together with forgotten paintings that have witnessed multiple stories, configure a story that places us inside and outside the work while transporting us to a fictitious temporality, which can both be past, present and future. This narrative mixes past and present historical events with the history of art itself and personal stories, which could be the artist's, that of the viewer themselves or that of the painting that hosts it.

Many works in this exhibition talk mainly about the relationship between art and power; a close, productive and controversial historical relationship that has interested Daviu throughout his career. If until now the incidence of the market in art had played a determining role in Daviu's work, the current moment we are living in Europe, with the war in Ukraine and the outbreak of fascism, events that shake democracy, have led the artist to question the function of art once deprived of its presumed independence and freedom.