Peter Freund Projects

ADVERSORECTO is a Barcelona-based artist collective co-founded in 2020 by Peter Freund and Werner Thöni.
Contact: Adversorecto@gmail.com

Statement

We are here to make your dreams come true. Our work is an act of love, and we mean this in the most profound sense of the word: «to give something one doesn’t have to someone who does not want it.» To wit, we see this structural lack of rapport not as a disappointment but as an occasion. For us, this is the essential condition of art. 

Adversorecto aims its sights on a conceptual backside of the visible surface. The target should be distinguished from something invisible that hides behind or beneath the surface. Instead, it should be conceived as something presented on the same visual plane but structurally obscured by it, a blindspot, the verso of a recto. Our projects seek this galvanizing element that remains hidden in plain sight: not invisible but unvisible.

We create new original works produced out of a collaborative model of non-consensus as well as combine works produced independently. We consider our working method (described below) as a possible path around some of the drawbacks and pitfalls ranging from traditional artistic solitude to today’s «social practice» and as a way to expand the creative relationship between artist and curator. We look to partner with curators and organizations who pursue uncompromising exhibits with an appetite for conceptual work and process presented in a broad range of mediums.

Process

Imagine the scene: Two artists watch each other working in the studio, slightly from afar, over the course of months. After one has left for the day, the other borrows or copies something from the one’s work, in fragments or whole-cloth, knowing little or perhaps nothing of the intended meaning of what s/he is taking. But s/he takes it nevertheless. The process at the same time goes in the other direction as well. New works are then created by making associations with the borrowed materials with no or minimal regard to mutual agreement or understanding of what was meant by the original. Gradually a body of work is developed and prepared as an exhibition. 

Imagine a second scene: The body of work is presented to another artist who is asked to function as a special sort of curator. The latter develops new work that reframes the corpus at hand. This new work aims to avoid the curatorial gesture that feigns an obedient, celebratory explication of the original artistic work, which in turn rolls over in flattered, self-satisfied submission. The curator instead endeavors to respond to the body of work by giving it a framework that is open in form and content but with little or no need to represent any explicit aims of the original artists. 

Finally, the two scenes are organized into a single «doubly retracted» exhibition.

Exhibition Proposal #1

Adversorecto: Round One (pdf). We are currently preparing a 2023 exhibition of Adversorecto: Round One at MUDAS Museum of Contemporary Art in Madeira, Portugal, in collaboration with Portuguese artist/curator Vitor Magalhães.

Exhibition Proposal #2

Adversorecto: Round Two (pdf). We are currently seeking collaborative partnerships to present and transform (by way of our method of collaborative retraction) this proposal. The proposed exhibition, comprising ten works of various mediums, investigates an expanded notion of «Schadenfreude», ranging from the psychological to the social and political senses of the term. The body of work includes the documented video-sound installation, «Agony: You Can Go Whenever You Want» and the multiple booklet «L’Auca d’en Felix» (see both below), among nine other works.

The feeling of agony always starts with two points in a weird calculus of time. The first point plots the location at which you’re moving irreversibly forward, and the second where it will all finally come to an end. You face the first point as excessive, a surplus, “too much”; you look ahead to the second as a decisive void, a lack, a point of relief. A person falling from a skyscraper. Strangers falling in love.

But while you move facing forward, fall facing downward, you do so only by looking back in your imagination from a permanently blind future. You cannot definitively experience the end that releases you. The scene of agony resembles a mathematical asymptote: a limit that is infinitely approachable but unreachable. The free fall of agony in this way opens its paradoxical space of enjoyment.

«Agony: You Can Go Whenever You Want» was produced by Adversorecto by working between two stipulated points during a five-month period. In making the two main components of the piece – five translucent painted panels and two video/sound projections – the artists collaborated deliberately with minimal contact other than sharing the start and end dates, the physical dimensions, and the theme of agony for the project.

The resulting work is an installation intended for viewers to walk through and to step back, stroll around, and experience as an ensemble.

[A preliminary version of «Agony: You Can Go Whenever You Want» was mounted in late 2021 at the gallery of the Fine Arts Faculty of the University of Barcelona. Many thanks to Eloi Puig, director of the Faculty of Fine Arts, and his staff for making this exhibition possible. (Video documentation: Maellyn Macintosh)]

Adversorecto entries on the blog.