“NON PLUS ULTRA” | GONZALO BORONDO, in collaboration with 56FILI
curated by Chiara Pietropaoli
with organisational support from STUDIO STUDIO STUDIO
FESTIVAL FACYL 2020
Exhibition → PALACIO DE LA SALINA: 22/09 – 31/10/2020
Calle San Pablo 18, 37001 Salamanca
Open → Sundays to Thursdays and holidays 10:00 am to 8:00 pm, Fridays and Saturdays from 10:00 am to 9:00 pm.
FESTIVAL FACYL presents “Non Plus Ultra”, a silkscreen-on-glass installation by the artist Gonzalo Borondo, created in collaboration with the 56Fili silkscreen studio and curated by Chiara Pietropaoli.
This sculptural work is designed to be an itinerant exhibition, out of a desire for its transparent elements, on each occasion, to establish a dialogue with new spaces and new visitors. Made of modules that can be arranged and rearranged at will, it lends itself to any number of aesthetic variations, depending on the artist’s perception of the surrounding space.
“Non Plus Ultra” was exhibited at the MACRO, Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Art, in 2018, and is now being presented in Spain for the very first time, at the Palacio de la Salina.
“Non Plus Ultra” is a movable installation of fifty sheets of glass used as supports for silkscreen printing.
Two graphic-pictorial images inhabit the same space: on one side a column, on the other a human figure seen from behind, arms extended, reminiscent of the crucifixion iconography. The overlaying of these two levels of impressions sets off an interplay of perceptions which changes what viewers see, depending on their perspective and the light.
The work reflects on the concept of limits and their negation, on man’s sacred urge to cross the threshold of what is known and logical, to explore what lies beyond us. Drawing on the rigor of the materials, Borondo establishes imagined pathways, with the repetitiveness and closeness of the figures creating perspectives of arches, openings, all meant to be an enticement, through the artist’s poetic treatment, to reach new destinations, to continue evolving.
The installation is intended to be an experiential process, an encounter with the limit, which is reached through a transparent labyrinth of signs and perspectives, reflections and symbols, all of them eventually melding with, and losing themselves in, the multitude, at one and the same time giving rise to questions and setting the viewer on the path to infinity.
“Non Plus Ultra” is the fruit of exploratory work with glass, poetics and transparency that Gonzalo Borondo has engaged in since 2011, plus his experiments in silk-screening, which benefited greatly from the invaluable contributions of Arturo Amitrano, the founder of 56Fili, whose technical skill, applied with an avant-garde sensibility, has allowed the artist to set out in new directions.
“Non Plus Ultra” takes a visionary approach to silk-screening, one under which rules border on the unaccustomed, errors are put to use, causes are encountered prior to discovery, and technical prowess ventures out beyond the boundaries of the white sheet of paper, playing with freedom and space in order to interact with the public, with life.
GONZALO BORONDO