Barry Le Va
After having participated in the Serralves Museum’s inaugural exhibition - Circa 1968 – the artist returns with a new exhibition in which he presents a work specifically designed for the museum’s spaces, together with a set of sculptures, drawings and collages that exemplify and document the essence of his creative process. At the outset, Barry Le Va’s work results from a set of actions such as throwing, spilling, cutting, breaking or scattering in order to determine the layout of materials in the exhibition room. Later , the distribution of elements in the room achieves a formal and compositional objectuality that nonetheless upholds the violent subversive condition of the exhibition space and the spectator’s references. All these processes are documented via drawings, some of which are produced prior to the work, some only after implementation. These drawings - which have a strong aesthetic autonomy - function as an instructions manual and also constitute diagrams of the actions that Barry Le Va uses in order to redefine categories of space and the object in his work.