BRICK GAMES
18 March - 25 May, 2022
L21 S’Escorxador
Hermanos García Peñaranda 1A
07010 Palma
Islas Baleares, España
Curated by Francesco Giaveri
Featured artists: Richard Woods, Dasha Shishkin, Gao Hang, Richie Culver, Eva Fàbregas, Álvaro Gil, Gabriele de Santis, Felix Treadwell, Ryan Browning, Jordi Ribes, Pixy Liao, Rachel Hobkirk, Matthew Feyld, Charline Tyberghein, Sepand Danesh, Grip Face
As Francesco Giaveri explains;
Games are always plural. A game has to be very disappointing to not want to start a new round and then another. The Brick Game video game console that flooded the market in the 90s promised to contain 9999 games. It was probably much less, but it doesn’t matter, without a doubt Tetris was the one that got me hooked, the one I liked the most. Many years later, I still play for long periods of time on airplane trips where they still offer this idle option. I love the paradox of how it works. To advance without advancing. To move up a level, the brick wall has to remain as low as possible, as other bricks progressively fall. If there are gaps in the wall and its height grows too high, until it passes the upper limit of the screen, the game ends. On the contrary, it is a matter of forming one or more lines, from one side to the other, compact and seamless, so that the bricks disappear, thus leaving more space for the others that, in the meantime, continue to fall, each time at a faster and faster speed. At the formal and chromatic level, it is a question of creating unions of independent fragments. Discontinuous unions awaiting the decisive fragment that will appear to resolve and complete the compact and seamless lines.
My favorite piece is Gao Hang's Boy gaze, 2021
GAO HANG, Boy gaze, 2021, Acrylic on canvas. 182.88 x 60.96 cm
L21 Gallery is a project that has continued to evolve over the years since it was founded by Óscar Florit in Palma de Mallorca (Spain) in 2012. At that time, the gallery was committed to the representation of emerging national artists and the experimentation with new exhibition formats. Examples of this were the projects The Envelope, The Window, at the gallery’s venue in Madrid, and the project The Apartment, which was awarded at ARCO 2015. L21 Gallery is currently an international and hybrid project located in two venues in Mallorca: a 450 m2 industrial building in Son Castelló industrial estate that has been hosting the gallery’s exhibition programme since 2016, and a second venue with five exhibition rooms in the city of Palma. These two large spaces allow us to freely develop the different aspects of the project: contemporary art gallery, artists’ residence and production centre (L21 LAB)
LINK: Brick Games
