PRUNNING
Exhibition by Albert Cano
19.11 to 30.12.2022
Opening, Saturday 19th November at 12 p.m. at ACVIC Centre d'Arts Contemporànies (Sant Francesc, 1 Vic)
Image: Albert Cano
The theory behind pruning is that it allows for better growth. If what has been pruned are images, what grows, perhaps, is our imagination. This text is made up of different imagined scenes that have grown from the images that Albert has pruned.
1. To the right of the image, autumn in a tree. From the limits of the paper, the image of a forest is generated, on the outskirts of Oslo, where 1000 spruces were planted in 2014. They will grow for a century. Later, its wood will be used to make the paper on which the hundred manuscripts collected during this period will be published. A century of expanding branches and ideas that, in 2114, will become a library.
2. In the upper left corner, leaves of the same dark green shade as the cypress trees in the garden in front of my house. The family that takes care of them are specialists in topiary art or geometric gardening. In each new season, the trees appear pruned to mathematical perfection. We have already seen them in the form of a sphere, a pyramid, a cylinder, a cube and a Möbius strip.
3. Just below these dark leaves, a pavement and the lamp post that last night illuminated the unsettling scene of a night pruning. On the other side of the street, the branches of a tree, which we could not identify because of the darkness, were falling on the asphalt, forming a mound. The black silhouette of a human figure could be seen on the wall that separates the garden, in which the tree grows, from the street. In the morning, we saw how the wall has extended vertically, becoming an invisible wall severing the branches of the tree, like the edges of these pages.
4. In another image, a piece of a skull. In the imagination, it is what protects the adolescent brain which has just begun the process of synaptic pruning. Every lesson learned throughout childhood was translated into a neural connection or branch that, now, at the age of twelve, is put to the test. The adolescent rehearses each of the previous lessons and, depending on the consequence or reaction that this generates, the brain decides whether that branch needs to be pruned, or not. The adolescent brain is an exhausted tree, because it is being pruned. On the outside, it is the uncertain image of the person who is and who is not yet.
5. In the room, layers of leaves, pruned images, strange, because they are a little of what they were, but above all, they are what grows, and what will grow outside the edges of the pages. Beyond these walls, the night light enters through the windows of the studio of Albert, a graphic designer who, in his spare time, prunes magazines with scissors. A gesture comparable to that of the adolescent brain that tests what has been learned. On the ground, crumpled branches and pieces of colourful leaves are piled up. Between them, in a pot, sprouts a plant.
Anna Dot
Albert Cano (Vic, 1968). Art director of the Eumo_dc studio. Parallel to this, he has developed an artistic work based mainly on collage and the combination of images found in the press and advertising that open paths towards the unconscious and the dreamlike imagination. His works have been exhibited in galleries in Barcelona and Vic and have been published in numerous magazines. He is also one of the editors of the self-publishing group Adicciones porquesí..
