This Painting Should Be Installed by an Accountant
Jonathan Monk
Here, the clerk or employee are anonymous cogs in the wheels of work. The painting is a valuable item that will momentarily pass through the hands of someone whose only instructions are those displayed on the work itself.
Homenaje al Banco de España por los empleados [Tribute to the Banco de España by its Employees]
Lorenzo Coullaut Valera
A hundred and one years before the employee in Jonathan Monk’s painting, the workers of the Banco de España joined forces to commission this sculpture. Placed side-by-side, the two works might be seen as a monument to wage labour.
Copyright (White/Blue)
Rogelio López Cuenca
This painting is similar in size to Monk’s work and employs the same educational rationale. In this case, it is we, the viewers, who become employees who need to be trained to chart a course between our memory of what a painting once was and the impositions of new market laws.
Blind Image #125 (Blue image)
João Louro
Here there is no longer any trace of the employee or the viewer. The work employs itself, on a zero-hours contract. It requires no-one else’s involvement. Its capacity to provide its own content and meaning makes us redundant.
Umbral [Threshold]
Guillermo Lledó
The viewer’s reflection in that black glass must come as near as possible to the vertigo of jumping into the void. That door, made from so little, provides the most authentic image of ourselves, what Michael Fried in 1967 termed ‘an excess of presence’.
Composición abstracta n.º 4 (Limbo) [Abstract Composition nº 4 (Limbo)]
José Maldonado
Whereas Guillermo Lledó’s work places us in front of a solid door, this painting blocks our way with a window. We can see nothing through it, not even our reflection. We can only turn inward to feel our way and confirm our own carnality.
Sin título [Untitled]
Pieter Vermeersch
Threshold, limbo and finally fading. All these forms of transition that might so easily be dismissed as “monochrome” share something in common. Just before the transition is complete, they break the illusion, revealing themselves as objects or works of art.
Tapia del estudio de Urola [Wall of the Urola Studio]
Isabel Quintanilla
These transitional figures do not necessarily require a smooth, uninterrupted, continuous surface. The peeling wall contains them and reveals them as a real object that is waiting outside, close to the artist’s studio.
Hostage LXVI
Art & Language
Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden have always said that those trees looming up behind the blotch of paint are lining a road near their studio. The blotches were formed by squashing the letters SURF in fresh paint with the piece of glass. And the letters are not letters but the floor plans of museums.
6407-19 (Silver series)
Wolfgang Tillmans
This might almost be a monochrome were it not for the barely visible marks showing that the photograph has been developed analogically. There is no such thing as an ideal, flawless monochrome surface. In such cases, the phenomenological experience (standing in front of the work) is essential.
Billete de cien pesetas [One Hundred Peseta Note]
Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo
Paper money is emblematic of the nineteenth-century movement of capital. In size and shape, this small painting resembles a banknote. In many ways, the movement of money and paintings is comparable.
El artista y su inspiración [The Artist and His Inspiration]
José Villegas y Cordero
These drawings are similar in size to Fortuny y Madrazo’s ‘One-Hundred Peseta Note’, although in this case, the design is for a 50-pesetas note. The new note contains an allegory of the relationship between the arts and the new financial system, a link that is rarely depicted in art.
El capital. La mercancía. Guilloché [Capital. Merchandise. Guilloche]
Daniel García Andújar
This is what one might term an 'NFT avant-la-lettre'. Like a Non-Fungible Token, it is a visual composition generated using digital techniques that defy forgery. The aim is to attract capital from financial speculation, with an allusion to one of its industries of choice, the arms trade.
Belmont VI
Soledad Sevilla
Despite the similarities in form, Soledad Sevilla’s geometric weft has little in common with the engraving techniques employed by Daniel García Andújar. They portray two very different forms of power. One draws on reliability, the other emits chromatic vibrations.
Poema números primos [Poem of Prime Numbers]
Esther Ferrer
We often wonder what lies inside the weft, in the depths of the fabric, fearing that the mesh is no more than the support for a vacuum. Ferrer’s sequences of prime numbers fill the void displayed by any weft.
Canto modular. Canons 22 [Modular chant. Canons 22]
Elena Asins
The impression created by these papers is akin to that of a series of photographs reflecting the development of an idea. An Eadweard Muybridge! Judging from this sequence, there is still plenty of life in the idea.
Monuments to Fiddling. Those Fucking Euros
Ana Prada
Finally, money is on show. Only in this way can its ambiguous identity as legal tender and art work be dispelled. In its last stage of life, it returns to the Banco de España Collection in the guise of a virtual monument.
Zona Euro [Euro Zone]
Ignasi Aballí
Ignasi Aballí’s lists reflect the categories that appear time and again in the daily press. The figures in euros transcribed in different fonts build a landscape of different amounts. Europe has become a territory defined by the movement of currency, a corporate wall decoration.
Contrato [Contract]
Sara Ramo
This strange item, somewhat akin to a mask, is made out of newspaper (particularly strips taken from the Financial Times). The DIY technique can be seen as the act of exorcism required to prevent the language of finance from continuing to employ its capacity to monitor desires.
Finsternis gekreuzter Schatten [Darkness in the Crossed Shadows]
Lothar Baumgarten
The optical illusion brings a new force capable of modifying places, such as the threshold in the photograph, traversed by geometric forms. The contact between the artist, Lothar Baumgarten, and the Yanomami nation of the Amazon rainforest supports the myth of a view that has managed to remain outside the rules of ethnocentrism.
White Passage
Hannah Collins
Photography should be a means of depicting a verifiable, empirical reality, but here – as in Lothar Baumgarten’s work – it is transformed into somewhere incoherent. For a viewer standing in front of this work, the large format creates the effect of a picture into which they can walk.
Fonació d'un paper [Phonation of Paper]
Perejaume
The impact of a flow of air on an unrolled length of paper might appear more appropriate for a laboratory experiment. The purpose here is not to extract the sound of inert objects, but rather to grant those voiceless items a communicative agency, before placing them in the ‘parliament of things’, as Bruno Latour would have it.
Díptico IV [Diptych IV]
Cristina Iglesias
A cardboard model, photographed and printed on copper plates, which emphasises this type of space that can be penetrated by the viewer. A 2-D version of a sculptural construction inspired by a model in miniature, a sculpture from which the characteristic dimensions of the medium have been stripped.
Indistintamente [Interchangeably]
Salomé Cuesta
This sculpture is literally traversed by light. The materials used give it a lightness that is atypical of sculpture, and yet the shape is reminiscent of a coffin or a box to hold a body.
Monumento a Echegaray [Monument to Echegaray]
Lorenzo Coullaut Valera
This typically nineteenth century monument stands on a plinth at the Banco de España headquarters. Although it bears inscriptions with the name of the person to whom it is dedicated, this is not its most enduring function. Unlike the other works in this itinerary, this constitutes a place from which one can look around.