Límite (implosión) (Limit [Implosion])
CVA
- Date:1982
- Material:Steel, wood, plaster and gold leaf
- Technique:Installation
- Dimensions:Variable dimensions
- Category: Installation
- Entry date:2011
- Register number:AD06334
CVA (Comité de Vigilancia Artística) was a collective consisting of Juan Luis Moraza and María Luisa Fernández, that was active between 1979 and 1985. The CVA represents a middle ground in conceptual practices in Spain, after which the so-called “new artistic behaviour” gave way to materialist criticism of the artistic medium and its exhibition space. This process took place at the time of a return to supposedly atemporal values in painting, and of an early constitution of the art institution and art spaces in a Spain that was nearing the end of its transition to democracy.
The CVA’s activities were influenced by the practices of artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Robert Smithson, Daniel Buren and Piero Manzoni, and found their defining area somewhere between exploration of language, the mechanisms of meaning and the crisis of the artistic medium. Límite (implosión) (Limit [Implosion]) is an installation consisting of numerous broken frame mouldings, a double pedestal and a golden steel globe, which looks like the aftermath of an explosion of limits themselves (the picture frame, the sculpture plinth) within a wider limit – that of the exhibition space. Referring to the work, the artists have pointed out that “the transformations of frames and plinths created the possibility for a game – which we could not yet call deconstructivist – about the emblematic presence of the ancien régime, involving political and cultural contexts.” The installation is a blunt response to the prevalence of painting in the early 1980s and is part of the will to change in the area of the reception and signification of art.
Carmen Fernández Aparicio