Press release - Fundación Helga de Alvear

Press Release
Márgenes de silencio (Margins of Silence)
Inaugural exhibition of the Centro de Artes Visuales de Cáceres
A project by José María Viñuela
3 June 2010/ February 2011
Fundación Helga de Alvear
Pizarro, 8 – 10003 Cáceres (España)
Tel. +34 927 626 414 Fax +34 927 226 853
general@fundacionhelgadealvear.es
www.fundacionhelgadealvear.es
Poems always have great white margins, great margins of silence where ardent memory burns feverishly
devoid of past. Paul Eluard
Most valuable art in our time has been experienced by audiences as a move into silence (or unintelligibility or
invisibility or inaudibility); a dismantling of the artist's competence, his responsible sense of vocation — and
therefore as an aggression against them. Susan Sontag
There is no such thing as empty space or empty time. There is always something to hear or something to
see. In fact, try as we might to make a silence, we cannot. John Cage
Artistic expression in our day and age has assimilated the transformations provoked by some of the radical
processes of rupture that occurred last century in the decades of the sixties and the seventies. Other
processes, this time of review and assimilation, containing specific aspects of identity, followed in the
subsequent decades.
The artistic manifestations of these years were often channelled through the successive additions and
superpositions of other media –sound, photography, film and video– and incorporated variables such as time,
space and movement, narrative and fiction, and the revival or rejection of languages.
Despite all this, we often continue to pose ourselves the same questions as our 20 th century predecessors.
Why does the perception of works of arts seem so abstruse to us on occasions? Why do they employ
strategies that tend to obscure the information of their content when they surpass a certain level of
understanding?
By choosing a component such as silence –which spreads across its own margins, in this case the margins of
the work of art– as an entry point for perception, the onlooker’s interest is activated from a different field
of experience.
While the language of visual, or audiovisual, communication may enter into conflict with the spectator,
silence appears as a pause –not an empty one– between two sequences of the appreciation of artistic works,
like another fragment of content.

The body of works on display in the exhibition presented here have been chosen because they illustrate, in a
wide-ranging and approximate way, some of the concepts related to silence, and to the trail of changes these
ideas have had on the attitudes of artists since the sixties last century.
The “margins of silence” symbolically encloses, therefore, the permeability of a specific place. A
permeability that must flow in order to enable the dialogue with these works to attain the required level of
intensity in each particular case.
On display in this exhibition are works by many artists that form part of the history of art and have
signposted some of the most frequented routes in its development over the past five decades.
Also on display are works by younger artists who have been very active, though not in the mainstream, in
creating their own unclassifiable languages.
The first exhibition to be held at the Centro de Artes Visuales de Cáceres endeavours to convey the range of
crucial moments for the development of recent art encompassed by the Collection and the singularity of the
works of art, ideas, methods and techniques that converge in it to build its appeal.
In addition, the current selection faithfully reflects the evolution of Helga de Alvear’s artistic concerns and
the affinities she has developed as her experience has grown in a field where one needs to be receptive and
constantly alert.
In this show the works on display are going to converse with the space and also with each other in a threepart
interplay, thus allowing the artistic experience to achieve its full expressive potential.