Hierarchie

Scratched paint on 48 glass sheets 100 x 200cm, treated with acid, animated through an intermittently lighting process.
Installation carried out in cooperation with 56Fili and Airlight Lab for Urban Nation Contemporary Art Museum.
Music by San Andrés Band, taken from the Segovia’s Holy Week Procession of 2011 (Spain).

Hierarchie is the Public Art installation realised by Gonzalo Borondo for Urban Nation Contemporary Art Museum, designed as temporary assistance for the outdoor area adjacent to the museum, in the Schöeneberg district in Berlin. When Urban Nation asked Borondo to realise the work, the artist was working in his studio at “get his paintings moving”. Meanwhile, he was testing with 56Fili the possibilities of applying acid on the glass and studying with Airlight Lab a lighting system able to represent motion without the intermediation of a screen.
Hierarchie brings together different level of the artist research, the will to animate painting in order to broaden the narrative dimension.

The work consist of a painting animation which breaks down the action of the subject into forty-eight pictures, obtained by scratching paint on glass sheets treated with acid, organised into three blocks of sixteen. The motion illusion was achieved by organising successively each sheet, according to a precise order designed to be combined with an intermittently lighting process, programmed in sequence. Most of the works made by Borondo over the past two years, including Aria, Golden Gate, Ubiquitas, show cyclic actions. In his mother tongue, Spanish, the term bucles identifies this infinite process; Gonzalo writes “the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning…” inside the funeral chapel where he has recently finished the work Cenere.
The works of the artist describe this circle, the becoming that his eye catches in the existence, felt by himself: he is flow, we are flow.

Hierarchie is the procession of a paranoiac and schizophrenic power, invisible to eye, showing contradictions.
A horse walks the streets of Berlin, changing his nature at every step.
Borondo identifies the innate instinctivity of the enormous beast (maybe recognising himself), repressed and influenced by man’s will, ruling partner and higher in the hierarchy for ages. The conflict between instinct and control, trust and submission bursts into the glass, emphasized by the holy and military drum roll.
Hierarchie is the processual behaviour of the power that advances through history, never being the same; is born, grows and dies, making room for the possible, for infinity.

Chiara Pietropaoli