Oriol Vilanova

Secret collection, 2022
Postcards

Old Masters (Greco), 2022–ongoing
Jacket and postcards

Spin-off, 2021–ongoing
Series of 27 postcards

Share your life with an image, 2022–23
Postcards

Borrowed Words, 2017–ongoing
Performance

Oriol Vilanova’s practice centers around re-contextualizing cultural artifacts — especially (but not exclusively) picture postcards acquired in flea markets — into contemporary art works that generate a critical and yet lively reflection on many of the issues of today’s image-centric and image-saturated culture. For Phenomenon 4, Oriol Vilanova presented four different works installed at different places and a performance. In Secret collection, a collection of postcards is displayed in a domestic drawer. A natural space for a forgotten collection. In Old Masters (Greco), a work jacket whose pockets are full of postcards of the works of the great painter El Greco, providing the visitor an ambitious retrospective that allows one to review its reproductions, repetitions and differences. The jacket is a display, but it is also the artist’s uniform that he uses to visit the flea market. These works were installed at the Corner House on Anafi. In Spin-off, the same sunset postcard from the North Sea, found twenty-seven times in different places and at different moments. The images aged, the changes are apparent. Many of them are written on, and each has a story. The accumulation of the stories is part of it. But it’s also about the importance of physical object in an age when images are digital and immaterial. The work was installed at the New School of Anafi. The work Share your life with an image, consists of a set of sunset postcards from Anafi’s Komvos souvenir shop which the artist suggested the visitors of Phenomenon 4 to carry in their jackets, bags or books for a year, speeding up the deterioration process of the image and its paper form. He then asked the visitors to send their postcard back to Anafi a year later. Download here the pdf with the instructions on how to return the postcard. Last, Borrowed Words was performed by Pedro Barbosa. It is a declaration of love from a collector to his collection. Object by object. The infatuated collector expresses his love tirelessly. Honest and used words resonate from the intimacy. Unorganized sentences without beginning or end.