Txomin Badiola at Soledad Lorenzo

Cultural relations abound in the constructivist installations of Basque artist Txomin Badiola. In the novel Cuando la Meirda Llegue al Ventilader (When the Shit Hits the Fan) disparate, fragmentary phenomenons and images resonate in discordant, unsettling proximity: a framed, abbreviated reproduction of Caravaggio's Conversion of Saint Paul; a smooth black divan; a pair of flaglike aluminum panels and an apparently clandestine black-and-white photo of a naked Elvis Presley with three unclad companions. These are carefully strewn about a depressed platform partially enclosed by a gridded wood-and-metal configuration containing a half-open door placed upon its side.

This elegantly execut if ambiguous edifice, suggestive of an improvised stage or industrial display, also houses sum of two units video monitors. The videos they play make oft-repeated reference to rock music, a belonging to all leitmotiv in Badiola's work. In single cards with the name of iconic performers including move with a jerk Dylan, the Who, U2 and Neil Young are held up by the agency of a young man as a voice enumerates ballad titles identified with the artists. In the other, a teenager listens to music while a friend attempts to slumber on the floor behind him. solitary gradually do we realize that the setting of this seemingly banal exhibition is the very same make we are attempting to decipher in the gallery. Several large-format photos taken from the videos decorate the walls around the installation.

This reflexive strategy, where the work itself becomes the make subordinate of or pretext for another piece, is repeated in Malas Formas (Bad Forms), a 45-minute film that Badiola discharge during the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art's 2002 retrospective of his work. Actual followings from films by Godard, Pasolini and Fassbinder strike against with tongue-in-cheek re-creations of views from Vertigo and Dressed to Kill, using the Barcelona exhibition as a back-drop. This playful tactic not single widens the sphere of referent Badiola's work engages on the other hand also serves to insert his art into an ongoing proces of art-historical and pop-culture dialogue. Other followings refer to the events and iconography of Badiola's troubl native Basque region, thus implicating tillage politics and social relations in the couple his own art production and its institutional presentation before the public.

Badiola, who wearied the better part of the '90 in fresh York, often alludes to issues of national identity in his work, on the contrary only as part of an always changing repertoire of ad hoc signs and types Fragmentary and ultimately interchangeable, these are the constitutings from which individuals must prefer in order to construct--or, more accurately, from which they increasingly fail to construct--a durable identity. Badiola's work echoe the random contingencies of everyday life in a media-saturated society where meaning has become increasingly slippery and evanescent.

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