The present moment. Pep Agut, Madrid Meridian: Dream and Lie

Description of project by Pep Agut

The title of the exhibition refers to two crucial aspects for the development of the exhibition. On the one hand, we have the “Madrid meridian”, which has its origin in 1884, when the International Conference took place in Washington in October in which it was approved to establish a single reference meridian, tangent with the Royal Observatory of Greenwich . In that same year, Spain promoted an unsuccessful attempt to create a local meridian 0o of Madrid (3o 41 ́ 16 ́ ́ west of Greenwich, 14 minutes and 41 seconds ahead of that).

This meridian of Madrid was also taken as a reference in the catalog of the General Exhibition of the Philippine Islands, inaugurated in 1887. The disaster of 1898 made its own meridian completely unsustainable; However, in 1942, Spain, by the decision of Francisco Franco finally adopted the time zone of the Berlin meridian, by which it is still governed today.

This text of the catalog edited by the Spanish government for the General Exhibition of the Philippine Islands has been one of the main sources of inspiration for Agut when carrying out this project; together with the work of two illustrious Spanish artists that he also completes the second part of the title of the exhibition: "dream and lie." These are Goya and The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters (1799), and Franco's Dream and Lie (1937) by Pablo Picasso.

In the exhibition you can see several plaster columns distributed on the floor, which reproduce the original ones of the Palace, whose molds are made in six parts of which only two have been assembled: “From the central structure where these two columns, spaces are being built to express different groups of ideas ”, says Agut. The resulting objects are still a trace of the process for its construction, and this horizontal arrangement subtracts all trace of functionality from the architectural origin of the Palace. The individuality of each column or that of each of the parts and sections arising from its molds is completed with a series of inscriptions made by the artist, who shares a tool, the burin, with the engravings of Goya and Picasso, especially with the etchings mentioned previously: The dream of reason produces monsters (1799) from the first or Franco's Dream and Lie (1937) from the second, one of the preliminary works for Guernica. Pep Agut supports himself and continues in this way that line of critical thinking from the arts to political circumstances that weigh down society as a whole.

At the same time, next to each group of columns, Agut has arranged a wide set of plaster tubers created from molds extracted from natural roots, some of North American and Filipino origin, such as the seven found in the central structure. Agut sarcastically associates them (he calls them "Franquitos") with those seen in Picasso's representation of the dictator in the eighteen small vignettes that make up the aforementioned engravings.

In short, in Meridiano de Madrid: Dream and Lie, Pep Agut reflects on all these circumstances from the present moment and invites us to reread and experience those times and their broad similarities with what we live today.