Echo

1 – 30 September / DC Open, Cologne / ECHO – The RYDER & diez

Fugue 3 Times is organised around three works in which Claudia Pagès constructs conceptual maps of three different verbal tenses while trying to break away from them. Her work, characterised by an overflowing and performative use of language, continues for this occasion with an investigation that she has been developing in
recent years focused on shipping systems and their connection with the body, jurisdictional language, its verbal tenses and its violence.

For this exhibition the artist creates a choreography of artworks that operates as a desire to escape from the semantics of the capitalist system through three pieces that make up an installation. Two of them are presented in the form of backlit light boxes on which we find images and texts that can only be read against the light, that is, they need an external agent to be deciphered. While in one of the pieces the artist uses tracing paper to create a narrative, in the other the story is told through handmade watermarks on white paper. Pagès chooses to record her narrative on these materials that the bureaucracy uses to copy and legitimise, thus dismantling its
strategies and rendering them vulnerable.

The story is completed with a third mobile and changing element that extends throughout the gallery space in the form of laser lights that are projected onto the walls. This high-tech material contrasts with the more manual and almost medieval tradition of the tracings and watermarks of the other pieces, creating a hybrid and disturbing space. The lasers file and project on the walls drawings created by the artist, functioning both as ephemeral graffiti and as a mobile archive made with light signifiers that travel and fragment through the space simultaneously.

This combination of choreographic texts presented in different formats results in a surplus of signifiers within the gallery that interacts with the visitor’s body, interrupting its time and breaking its linearity. This fracture is where Pagès operates, seeking to create a constellation of fugitive works, which are always trying to break away from a system in which they have not learned to exist.

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CLAUDIA PAGÈS RABAL (Barcelona, 1990). Visual artist, performer and writer. Lives and works in Barcelona. Claudia Pagès has read, performed and exhibited at CA2M (Madrid, 2023), Fundació Joan Miró (2023), Tabakalera (Donostia, 2022), diez (Amsterdam, 2022), Vleeshal (Middelburg, 2022), The Ryder (Madrid, 2022), MACBA (Barcelona, 2021), Kunstverein Braunschweig (2021), La Casa Encendida (Madrid, 2021), CAPC (Bordeaux, 2022), HAU2 (Berlin, 2019) and Sharjah Art Foundation (Sharjah, UAE, 2018), among others. Pagès Rabal had a book published by Onomatopee (2020) and is preparing a new book with Wendy’s Subway (2023). Claudia has received the Mondriaan Werkbijdrage Jong Talent (2016-2017), Ojo Critico Prize (2022) and has been resident at Gasworks (London, 2017), Triangle France (Marseille, 2020) and Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (2020-2022).