Pep Vidal is not only an artist, but also a mathematician with a doctorate in physics. His poetic artistic research is strongly influenced by his scientific curiosity and aided by his expertise. Past and current projects such as ?Following the North Pole (Magnetic)? (presented at La Casa Encendida in Madrid) and ?Trees, forest boundaries and global models? (as seen at PACE in Bordeaux) deal with the notion of invisible concepts that shape reality and our understanding of it. Chasing the North Pole, not the reliable and unchanged point of reference we would think, or painstakingly dividing a tree into identical sections in volume are actions that unveil the powerful potential of these forces, imperceptible in our daily lives. Its exploration takes shape through the most diverse media and materials; installations, paintings, drawings, videos and photographs, always resulting from rigorous procedures which have been able (and have withstood) the test of the strictest of laboratories.
Vidal's efforts have been recognized with prestigious awards, such as the La Caixa Production Award and the GAC AWARD for Best Exhibition by an Emerging Artist in 2019, and the Montemadrid Foundation Generation Award in 2015.
"Chronicle of the Birth, Growth and Death of a Cloud" is Pep Vidal's second solo show at LMNO.
It was sparked by an ambitious endeavor that the artist / scientist has spent the past two years planning and actualizing.
This project deals in particular with the technical and intellectual struggle to measure and trace the shape of a cloud from the moment it materializes until the moment it disappears. Not only is it quite complicated to follow a cloud and its alterations through time at considerable heights, but the very concept of a "cloud", its essence and its relationship to other objects and space had to be explored and explored. challenged to achieve the final intention.
The artist has been thinking since his childhood on the riddle "Is the cloud near and small or is it far and large?" and relativity and paradox in the act of measuring, as opposed to just looking.
Using photogrammetry, a technology that uses many telephoto lenses (in this case 9) to capture the cloud multiple times from all directions, Vidal and his team were able to trace a cloud from its birth to its disappearance, through the changes. infinitesimals he suffered. Inspired by this discovery, the works on display are drawings, paintings, sculptures and videos that attempt to answer the question "how to measure something as ephemeral, volatile and inconstant as a cloud?" moving and imaginative, with the tenderness often so apparent in Vidal?s work.
Produced within the framework of the artist support program of the ?la Caixa? Foundation. This project also received support from the Embassy of Spain in Brussels.
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