EXHIBITION n. 106
EXHIBITION TITLE: PETROL
ARTIST: SANTIAGO PICATOSTE
CURATED BY: ELENA FORIN
INAUGURATION: SATURDAY 28 FEBRUARY AT 18.30
PERIOD: 6 FEBRUARY 09 – 30 APRIL 09

In this research pollution does not seem to be simply a theme but also a genuine way of working in order to account for the depth of contamination of our times, in which history, environment, gesture, and action are inevitably united in order to create what Picatoste considers a new ethic.
Like Petrol, the other series (New Pollution, for example) are important for their environmental theme; yet we are not dealing with a simple ecological defence but, rather, with something more refined, something which hints at pollution as an evil afflicting our world and yet also considers it a generative fact about city life: it separates itself from this specific aspect in order to become a proliferating and productive seed.
This is why synthetic paints and enamels generate a hallucinated and luxuriant aspect, because the stain that spreads so widely is no longer an easily identified symbol of (specifically marine) degradation, but is also a metaphor of sensational, metropolitan filth, just as it is of the unstoppably confusing and productive voracity of the urban masses. In some way it seems the sign of presence, of affirmation, of extreme and violent communication, almost as though to stress the idea of the natural and social identity that continually succumbs to the ghost of nothingness, of levelling out, of the anonymity of the spectral negation of the non-place. So nature then grows where nothing else can: it proclaims its importance and evidence, and it does so by insisting on its own contrariety and negation, its synthetic genesis, its hallucinated architecture, the swollen and torn conformation of bleeding colour which taints and dirties with its own wound.