Future, Berlin
For ART-O-RAMA 2018, Future Gallery presents new works by Spanish artist Rubén Grilo. On view are laser etched denim snapped onto aluminum stretcher bars installed on the wall. As well as wall objects made out of tinted hard plastic chocolate pieces on powder-coated steal sheets. The point of departure is the tradition of conceptual and digital art, confronting its alleged intangibility with a necessary materialization. Grilo explores the notion of art as information, experimenting with translating malleable data into physical form.
Pattern Free: Ripped from Zara is an ongoing series of work Rubén Grilo started in 2013. Grilo presents new works from this series, where he reproduces the “used look” of Zara jeans. Examining the relationship between the body and craftsmen work, he designs industrial objects targeted for consumption and is observing the field of artistic production from the industrial perspective and vice-versa. Grilo’s usage of standardization, scaling and abstraction deals with the history of industrialization and modern production with a view on the cultural digital paradigm shift and the Internet.
In the chocolate series (2015 – ongoing), he reverses the process of the serial production of a luxury product of the food industry, chocolate, by creating plastic moulds out of the original product from a diversity of companies, and thus questioning the exclusivity of patented brand production. His research-based work has been focused in the exploration of strategies used by corporations to produce and distribute products and brands, and it takes the form of installations in which complexity, analogies and the physical qualities of display play a major role.