Andrew Barsch - Journalist

Up-and-coming young scenester Vicente Blanco recently inaugurated his latest opus, the video projection piece Algunas Veces Pasa Cuando Estáis Dormidos, at Reina Sofía’s Espacio Uno. I caught up with him at the opening cocktail party, and got him to take his digs at the scene in Madrid, and the state of the art in 2004. This was all while sipping back champagne and soaring through one of the most introspective yet relatable exhibitions we’ll see this year anywhere in the capital.

In typical subversive, avant-garde fashion, an interview with Blanco leaves us with more questions than answers. The artist simply turns concepts on their ear to give us a whole new realm of things to ponder, all without taking credit for any of it. Thirty years old and just five years out of art school with a repertoire of exhibitions around Europe and into the States, Galician whiz-kid Vicente Blanco is the buzz name in contemporary art. Which is probably why Museo Reina Sofía snatched him up for their Espacio Uno exhibition going on throughout October.

Fresh off the trail from our sister city of Berlin where he now resides, Blanco comes to Madrid and goes the “let the art speak for itself” route of simplifying his complexities. He doesn’t like to give too much away about the ideas behind his thoughts, and even less so about his work. Comparing the art scene here in Madrid with that of the rest of Europe Blanco says, “In Spain there is a large dependency on institutions who don’t tend to invest in contemporary art.” Whereas elsewhere there’s more of a pick-up band attitude toward getting some floorspace and putting together an exhibition. “The situation in Berlin is great. Although there’s no money, there’s this artistic movement that’s always organising activities and exhibitions. In Spain too much importance is put on galleries where exhibitions are held, while over there everything is more provisional. You can find exhibitions in isolated areas, and with a significant number of visitors.”

Throughout all of his subversiveness, Blanco does seem to be trying to tell us something, mostly by making us figure it out for ourselves. “I’m interested in art as something that can help us build new meanings within the society in which we live,” he says. His questioning of meaning takes on many physical forms: “I’m exploring different media, from video to drawing, from which I explore identity and narration.” Identity is certainly narrated this month at the Reina Sofía. This time digital animation projected onto three different screens was chosen as the medium with which to build new meaning.

Blanco explains, “My project for the Reina Sofía consists of small animations, quite simple, where I present a bit of narration which is suspended in such a way that the spectators themselves figure out what they’re seeing through their own experience.” In all three projections, Blanco only tells half a story, or maybe even less. Most of the fun comes in imagining what may have come next had the animation carried on. In the first of two rooms there are two sketches of a 20-something hipster kid sleeping on a bus. Projected alongside is a short animated video of three such young men sleeping on a bus in front of a school, which then segways into bubbly electronic music presenting titles of the men starring as protagonists in an animated short entitled East Journey. Then it goes back to the beginning. You and I have to decide what the film of three pretty young men sleeping on a bus would have been about. Had it been made, that is. Blanco is counting on our own experience to figure that one out.

At the party, Blanco reeled around the space, almost side-stepping questioners as to where his work would go from there. My cocktail partner and I had fun making up adventures for the East Journey stars for the rest of the evening.

On to the longer, darker, more introspective room of the exhibition, with an elongated projection screen along one of the walls, and a shorter screen off to one side. The longer screen depicts a digi-animated cartoonish countryside with chirping crickets to get the right effect, and then bang! An industrial reverb buzz slams into your ears as the countryside tranquillity fills up with satellite receptor dishes beaming out rays of white light, while on the adjacent screen a hunky young delivery boy discusses the tools needed to open a package addressed to a man who didn’t know it was coming. I think I saw a porno film that started out that way. Or maybe it was a pizza delivery. At any rate, Blanco leaves it right there only to be replayed again and again, and we never do get to see what was being delivered. In typical postmodern fashion, we’re the ones left pondering what would be to come.

Blanco’s postmodern attitudes are also reflected in his lack of reverence toward exhibiting under the same roof as arguably the most revered collection of 20th-century masterpieces in the world. But this is the new century, the new world, and there goes Vicente, re-building meaning for the new millennium. “The truth is that it’s difficult to measure the influence of artists of the past,” he says. “They’re our cultural legacy and we’ve inherited that, and from that we carry on, rethinking some of their approaches, or rejecting many others. The concept of ‘master’ is being questioned heavily in contemporary art.” He applies the same attitude toward himself as well. When asked how he’d like to be remembered, Blanco quips, “As anyone else, who’s trying to do his job well.” And the kid really seems to believe in this self-proclaimed meaningless meaning in his work, whatever that may be, while not really believing in its worth in making a difference in the world. All that, and he leaves the pondering to us.