
Alberto Peral (Santurce, 1966) belongs to the generation of artists who emerged in the early nineties and was a protagonist in the renewal of Spanish art at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Since his first solo exhibition at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona in 1992 until today, he has created a journey of great conceptual consistency and a desire for formal experimentation that has led him to travel through a wide range of media, from drawing, photography or sculpture, to installation and video. With them he proposes a thrilling encounter between the poetic beauty of the most simple and essential shapes and the symbolic power they contain.
Peral incorporates into his language the most radical contributions of classical art in regards to form; he discovers formal essentialism in nature and in culture as manifestations of a cosmic order endowed with intense material sensuality with which he attracts delight and reflection.
Ovoid shapes as a rudimentary symbol, circularity, rotation, the sky-earth axis, light and colour, are fundamental elements with which Peral builds a subtle poetry of the universe and the sense of time-space that unfolds in multiple directions and increases with experience from other places, as he has done through his travels in Mexico, Brazil, Europe, India and Japan.
This exhibition starts with the filming in 16 mm of a number of repertoires by a group performing traditional dances. They are dances whose origin is uncertain even though its structure can be dated to the nineteenth century. The artist is interested in dancing as construction, where the rhythms join together into an internal structure, closed and unitary. The dances have been chosen for their circular structure. The dancers rotate and create shapes that seem like cosmic structures. In fact its initial meaning seems to be a way of communicating with the cosmos, for which reason his vision is a zenithal one. They are not dances for shows, they are for rituals; the spectator does not exist as a spectator. The result relates these forms with both molecular structures and with Baroque domes or Indian tantric diagrams. Peral presents pieces in which the dances are transformed into an expansive diagram, into a nucleus or energy point, into a mantra-yantra, where music, form and dance make up a whole, a generating principle.
Exhibition´s details
Current exhibitions
-
1 December 2023 – 10 March 2024
Ulla von Brandenburg
One-Sequence Spaces
-
29 November 2023 - 11 March 2024
Ibon Aranberri
Partial View
-
15 November 2023 - 4 March 2024
Picasso 1906
The Turning Point
-
4 October 2023 - 26 February 2024
Ben Shahn
On Nonconformity
-
27 September 2023 - 22 January 2024
Call It Something Else
Something Else Press, Inc. (1963-1974)
-
27 October 2023 - 9 February 2024
Text and Image, a Perfect Symbiosis
José García Tella Through His Personal Archive
Library and Documentation Centre