GRIP FACE

Installation View of ‘SASHIMI CONSCIENTE EN LA CABAÑA DE CRISTAL, MAWM (my algorithm without me)’

How can the invisible today represented by the algorithm be made visible again so that we can finally break free from the shackles? David Oliver’s recent work approaches this need very intentionally. What is striking is the reclaiming of the scale of artistic work and the proposals of having a refuge from the weight of the digital connection, undertaken in this double exhibition that defies the current situation that, desiring so much to advance in the new, is becoming cautious in the face of what is important. We see here how he recovers the dial work on a colossal scale and the intimate work on a small scale, at the same time as he proposes two different kinds of refuge, Grip Face with a tepee lined with mirrors, and David Oliver with a closed colosseum of gigantic canvases that are a kind of APP devoured by a bear disguise that prevents us from seeing what’s real (or vice versa).

Installation View of ‘SASHIMI CONSCIENTE EN LA CABAÑA DE CRISTAL, MAWM (my algorithm without me)’

David Oliver is concise, perfectionist, delicate and disturbing in his artistic discourse to find the thread of these two shelters in the face of uncertainty, where concept meets narrative. Therefore, it is an artistic discourse that is very daring personally speaking and of great audacity in material terms. This double exhibition has nothing to do with anguish or lack of values; it has to do with the personal greatness of an artist capable of responding to the weight of the digital in our lives. At the end of the creative process Grip Face takes refuge in his main demos, a Conscious Sashimi in the Crystal hut, a sort of Totem that defies the current Taboo of not being true to oneself: a tepee of more than four metres lined with mirrors as if they were tapestries that protect from the (digital) cold, covered with protective symbols that come from the personal, intimate universe of the artist himself: fetishes, avatars, smiling faces full of peace, doodles loaded with messages, flowers or deconstructed landscapes.

And then the questions to which answers are being sought: where to store all this information so as not to fall into chaos? Isn’t the refuge offered to us by our own conscience? And the answer offered by the artist: Magnetic mirrors in which to place “protective” objects, like those “memories” stuck on the fridge at home that you can put on or take off as you please, but which serve to protect you from external digital noise, and from this perspective, the reflection of a mural in which the artist recovers the refuge of his childhood through boxes of Polaroids intervened with small oil paintings of Mediterranean landscapes, of mountains, blue skies or flowers, echoes of those childhood years that he now offers to us from the resin as if this gesture was the transition from childhood to adulthood, and which, contrast with the large canvases of the coliseum in the next room, with intimate paintings of a material essence, in oil that, sooner or later, lead to the digital.

Installation View of ‘SASHIMI CONSCIENTE EN LA CABAÑA DE CRISTAL, MAWM (my algorithm without me)’

In the next stage, David Oliver opens a door for us to enter MAWM’s My algorthim without me, an enclosed coliseum where the spectator and David himself find themselves on the arena, surrounded by the circle formed by six immense canvases. Canvases that build another hut that attracts and traps you as if it were a social network. All connected to each other, with no possible way out. Characters with their backs turned, with brown, golden hair, like the fur of the bear, or of the bear costume, that clings to the braids and prowls around the canvas, that presence of the virtual that no longer needs to hide. Only one is facing forward, with the mask adhered to the face, as if already aware of how difficult it is to get out of that shipwreck that is the APP that controls us with the same force that Melancholia did to Dürer’s character, and perhaps also with the same certainty that it is not possible to understand the universe.

Impeccable technique, polished, shiny texture, like the mirrors of the tepee. Grip Face works the other way round from the modern ones, first the analogue, paints, photographs and then passes it to the digital from where he intervenes and reflects on why we cannot escape the algorithm. And then, can we imagine what is behind these canvases? Grip Face, David Oliver, always leaves something on the back, as if there is a hidden message that we should look for, like a note that only those who scratch the surface or lift the bearskin can see.

Curatorial text by Almudena Blasco Vallés.

LA BIBI
Carrer del Molí del Comte, 47A, 07010, Palma de Mallorca
0034 971 465 498

WEBSITE  INSTAGRAM  YOUTUBE  ARTSY