Oier Iruretagoiena at WIELS Project Room / Brussels

Oier Iruretagoiena / Diagrammes

02.11 – 26.11.2023
 
WIELS Project Room
Avenue Van Volxemlaan 354, 1190 Brussels

 Photography: © Isabelle
Arthuis

 

 

My reading normally tends towards essays, and in
recent years I have come across books that included double axis diagrams,
graphically representing certain contents. They were essays by Carlo M.
Cipolla, Michel Serres and Viktor E. Frankl

 

Carlo M. Cipolla, Italian
historian, presented his graph in a humorous essay called The Basic laws of Human Stupidity, which was initially circulated
solely among friends, but ended up being published widely and translated into several languages. The graph represents
how the interaction between two people is
based on the naivety, intelligence, stupidity or evil of both parties. It
is obviously an ironic proposal, because the complexity of human relations
cannot be reduced to such a simple scheme.

 

Michel Serres also uses irony in Le Parasite. Among other things,
parasite
designates the interferences or noises that occur in telecommunications,
and he uses this meaning to exemplify the difficulty of communication between
two people. Something is always lost between speaker 1 and speaker 2,
because «in order to hear the message alone, one would have to be identical to
the sender».

 

Viktor E. Frankl doesn´t speak directly about human
relations, but does so about the meaning of life, what would be found, he asks,
in something or someone beyond oneself. Among the several graphical schemes he
used in his texts, the image employed here shows a sinusoidal curve hidden
between two planes, that wouldn´t be visible from all points of view.

 

The diagrams could have been more, or from other
authors. As well as sharing both axes, what unifies the three of them is having
come across my path, in a non premeditated derivative that ends up reflecting
the conductive line of my interests. These readings have been one work material
more in the studio, marking the reference point for the group of objects and
drawings that are here presented.

 

Oier
Iruretagoiena
(Basque Country – Spain, 1988) lives and works
in Bilbao. He started off his creative practice in experimental music before
expanding to sculpture, interventions in the public space and text. He uses
readily available materials and mediums, leaving evidence of the process and of
the inner material composition of the works in the final result. His work
accrues various layers of meaning and references touching on recurring
interests which range from rural and religious imaginaries to dystopias, and it
is also characterized by a search for the discordances produced in the
ambivalence of ironic distance.

 

He graduated with a BA in Fine Art from UPV-EHU in
2011, including an exchange with Universitat de Barcelona, and in 2018 he took
part in the WIELS residency programme in Brussels. He has had solo shows at
CarrerasMugica gallery in Bilbao (2023, 2019 and 2015), at Ana Mas Projects
gallery in Barcelona (2022), at San Telmo Museum in Donostia-San Sebastián
(2021), and at the Halfhouse space in Barcelona (2014), among others. He has
also exhibited his work in various group shows: “The Point of Sculpture” at
Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona (2021), “Generación 2020” at La Casa Encendida
in Madrid (2020), “Le Petit Cercle Bruxellois” at Institut de Carton in Brussels
(2019), “Bi Dos Two” at Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao (2018), “Cale, cale, cale!
Caale!!!” at Tabakalera in Donostia-San Sebastián (2017), and “Otzan” at
Galería Elba Benítez in Madrid (2016). In addition, from 2011 to 2020 he was
one of the coordinators of Club Le Larraskito in Bilbao, and from 2020 to 2023
he wrote a column for the basque newspaper Berria.