La casa del savi. Gonzalo Elvira

Experiments and observations

Since the mid-90s, the practice of Gonzalo Elvira has developed as a continued investigation of the official mechanisms through which history is produced, transmitted and legitimised. His work situates itself in a critical territory that examines the constructive apparatus of historical memory, paying particular attention to the figures, episodes and movements that have been displaced towards the periphery of the dominant narrative of political and cultural modernity.

In his praxis, drawing occupies a structural location. His drawings function as an epistemological device and as an assembly technique that makes it possible to relate heterogeneous materials originating from different registers - documents, archive images, historiographic references, textual fragments or displaced iconographies. Through this procedure, the image ceases to operate as an illustration of a canonical narrative to become an articulating space in which the past is reconfigured through new constellations of meaning.

La casa del savi (The house of the sage) adopts this work logic to the full, despite introducing a significant displacement in the time arc that Elvira’s research normally occupies. The project dates back to the late 18th and early 19th century, and takes as its starting point the figure of Antoni Martí i Franquès, one of most significant scientists of Illustration in Catalonia. His investigations on the composition of air and his pioneering experiments around photosynthesis place him at the centre of a scientific culture which, at that time, aspired to reorganise our understanding of the natural world from the principles of reason and experimentation.

The life of Martí i Franquès spanned a profoundly turbulent historical period. The political transformations resulting from the Napoleonic expansion in Europe and, in particular, the siege of Tarragona in 1811, introduced a dimension of violence and rupture that had a direct impact on the social fabric of the city. This crossover between illustrated rationality and the historical experience of the devastation is one of the backdrops implied in this project.

The installation conceived by the MAMT is articulated through a series of drawings produced especially for this occasion. There are various motifs associated with the scientist: a portrait of Martí i Franquès, scenes that evoke episodes from his biography, fragments of letters written during his lifetime or direct allusions to his investigative work. These images are not presented as illustrations of a linear historical narrative, but as fragments that introduce points of condensation within a broader visual structure.

The drawing operates as a form of temporal inscription that maintains an ambivalent relationship with the archive. On the one hand, it contains documental signs that refer to a specific history; on the other, it introduces a margin of interpretation or displacement which destabilises any pretension of historical transparency. Thus, the manual gesture of the drawing becomes a space where the memory is simultaneously recorded and reinterpreted.

This dimension is intensified through the incorporation of a continuous sequence of projections of slides that cover the walls of the exhibition room in darkness. Some of the projected images are photographs taken by the artist himself from the historic archives of Tarragona, where documents relating to the life and scientific work of Martí i Franquès are kept. Alongside them appear other images of a heterogeneous nature: visual materials relating to science, abstract forms or iconographic fragments that maintain a deliberately open relationship with the historical narrative.

The superposition between the projections and the drawings generate a visual field in permanent transformation: the images traverse the drawings on the walls and displace themselves on the surfaces of the space and on the audience, which produces visual associations that are always unstable.

By activating the figure of Martí i Franquès in the same building in which he lived, La casa del savi also introduces a reflection on the relationship between knowledge, history and space. In it, the museum appears as a location traversed by temporal layers in which the past is not presented as a stabilised narrative, but as a field of forces susceptible to being reactivated from the present. In this gesture, the practice of Gonzalo Elvira once again situates itself in one of the conceptual cores that have crossed his work: the critical exploration of the ways in which history is constructed, conserved and, frequently, diluted to the margins of collective memory.

Juan de Nieves