Goat Track Pig Trail

The exhibition basically continues and develops the approaches presented in the joint show “A donde quiera que vaya no conocen mi nombre (Everywhere I go, they don’t know my name) at the FOC space in Barcelona, which Adrian Altman and Bianka Chladek concluded their long-term residency there. The exhibition Goat track, Pig trail refers in its title to the natural shortcuts and paths, trodden by humans and animals that appear in cities and in countrysides off the main communication routes. We all know and use some of the footpaths that we use to shorten our journey, and more than once we are tempted to turn off the official road and take the one that is trodden in the grass nearby. English refers to these alternative routes by the phrase “desire path” - literally translated as path of desire (which in English conjures romantic images of natural paths winding through the countryside, contrasting with the strict urbanism of city roads.) Natural shortcuts and paths, their imperfection and naturalness, are also a free metaphor for the creative approach and proximity of the work of both authors. Bianka Chladek’s works are blurred visual collages on the border between abstraction and figuration. On the one hand, the embroidered and illustrated overlapping pieces of textile patches echo an endless stream of images from Tumblr or lnstagram, but on the other hand, they show a certain homemade, DIY imperfection of stitches and joints that is familiar to anyone who has ever repaired a piece from their wardrobe. The hybrid form of layering and patching the individual parts of the images is also repeated in the embroidered illustrated figures and objects, which are also composite entities, half real, half abstract. (...) In this exhibition, Adrian Altman combines recent wooden objects with abstract paintings. The roughly worked pieces of wood evoke bodily entrails connected by metal hooks and painted with Vaseline. The decorative elements also refer to the visuality of works created at folk sculpture symposia. The images, bolted onto brawny metal brackets like a small LCD screen or tablet, strangely grow out of a fleshy organic object whose surface resembles skin. The haptic and slimy nature of these objects stands in contrast to the technicist steel bracket and the abstract motifs of the images in metaphorical screen-saver mode on the screens in Alza’s showroom. Their parts, however, distantly remind us of something we have seen before but cannot remember where and when it was - a fragment of memory is lost in the visual noise of our memory.The hand-embellished surfaces of the objects in the form of textile patches, sticky layers of roughly worked wood or tattooed peels of scattered apples have a common basis in the inspiration of folk creativity and the desire of each of us to beautify and distinguish ourselves even at the cost of imperfection.