Los olvidados de Patrick Hamilton

21/09/23 - 7/01/24
Aljub / Casal Solleric
Cicle 1,2,3... Acció!

Curated: Cooperativa Performa and Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta

In Los Olvidados Patrick Hamilton presents five sculptural works made with intervened work tools. Saws, trowels, bricks, spatulas and baskets are elements that belong to the “precarious” world of the worker, the construction worker, the bricklayer and the carpenter. These objects are intervened by the artist in a constructivist key with the colors of the “collectivist” movements that marked union politics during the twentieth century.

With a work of a conceptual nature, which crosses formal elements of the post-war Latin American, North American and European abstract-constructivist movements with the conceptual canon of the Chilean neo-avant-garde, Patrick Hamilton's work has reflection and questioning as its guiding thread. of the concepts of work, economy, memory and history in the context of the last decades in Chile, particularly the period known as post-dictatorship. In this sense, his work has involved a constant aesthetic reflection on the consequences of the “neoliberal revolution” implemented in Chile by Pinochet and the group of economists known as the Chicago boy's, during the seventies and eighties and its projection. in the social and cultural field from then until now.

The work and visual thought of Patrick Hamilton can be understood as a portrait of the economic and cultural processes that Chile and so many other parts of the world have suffered under the influence of neoliberalism in recent decades. His work is characterized by a formal rigor that goes hand in hand with historiographic research processes and archival review of specific cases and phenomena typical of conceptualism. In this sense, his practice is characterized by an interdisciplinary material and aesthetic development in which he uses a large number of visual resources and formats ranging from collage, archive and photography, through sculpture, installation and architectural intervention.

For the Casal Solleric exhibition, the Chilean artist has prepared specifically for the space an unpublished work in which simple plastic baskets project various photographs of the Mediterranean Sea dyed red. The set of these works problematizes the relationship between formalism and conceptual art, while at the same time calling into question the hierarchies between art, work and design. Through his works, Patrick Hamilton raises a reflection on how in recent decades the class struggle would have been replaced by identity politics and struggles for recognition, in a time deeply marked in South America by frustrated attempts at transformation. social and from an affect of hopelessness and cancellation of the future, winking at the same time to the immigration problem that the Mediterranean countries face as ports of entry to Europe.