At once minimal and spectacular, Pablo Valbuena's audio and sound sculptures often immerse the visito, in an augmented architecture. Virtual and reality overlap, transforming our perception of time and space.
Ephemeral and immersive sculptures, Pablo Valbuena's works are generally conceived according to the spaces that welcome them, whether they be public spaces or museum rooms. For each artwork, be it monumental or not, the artist fashions sound, light and movement, ephemeral and intangible materials. Using simple elements - lines, dots, notes, geometrical shapes - and technical tools of great precision, he plays with the intensities, the scales and the motifs to create artworks that are as spectacular as they are minimalistic. lnserted in a familiar architecture, they underline it whilst also going further.
Based on a study of space, time and perception, Pablo Valbuena creates a double score, audio and visual, that,estructures a venue by fashioning our sense of space and time....In his sculptures and installations, the virtual is not opposed to the real. On the contrary, their overlapping suggests a parallel architecture to the visito,, an augmented space in perpetual transformation where the boundaries between reality and what is perceived disappear. Totally immersed, the spectator is led into a fictional space in which he/she may create his/her own story.
His practice explores the overlapping between daily and virtual life; the generation of mental spaces by the observe,; the dissolution of boundaries between reality and perception; the links that connect space and time; the pre· eminence of subjective experience as a phenomenological tool to stimulate the thought process, and the use of light and sound as materials.
At the CENTQUATRE·PARIS, Pablo Valbuena will namely create a monumental installation for the Aubervilliers Hall, kinematope [2 paralleles]. These two parallels will play with the frequency of movement, creating alignments and disruptions but in the same movement.
He will also display several existing artworks, some of which are still unknown. lt will be the first solo exhibition of the artist in France.
These ideas are developed in a contextual manner and formulated as a direct response to the perceptual qualities, the physical conditions and the ambient influences of a given venue and space.
Pablo Valbuena is regularly invited to talk about these subjects in an academic context, namely at the Fresnoy - Studio national, at the University of California in Los Angeles and the University of Bern.
Biography
Born in 1978 in Madrid, Pablo Valbuena graduated in 2003 from the ETSAM (Su· perior Technical School of Architecture of Madrid). He currently lives and works in Toulouse, France. Space, time and perception are at the heart of his research. Amongst the key elements of his work, Pablo Valbuena is interested in the super· imposition of the physical and virtual worlds, the dissolution of the boundaries between reality and perception and the pre-eminence of subjective experience as a communication tool. These ideas have primarily given rise to on-site artworks, formulated according to perceptive qualities, physical conditions and influences surrounding a given space. Pablo Valbuena has shown his work in public and pri· vate establishments, on the occasion of biennials and in art galleries, in the shape of exhibitions, installations and interventions in front of a wide audience, in Europe, Asia, and America (Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria in 2007; Vooruit in Gent, Belgium in 2009; Museum of Seoul, South Korea in 2014, etc.).
Various / French collaborations
lnvited by José-Manuel Gon~alves, Artistic Director of Nuit Blanche 2014, Pablo Valbuena namely created the monumental artwork Kinematope for the Austerlitz train station - kinema -: movement (from the Greek kínema) - tope: place (from the Greek topos). This project, that is part of the Kinematope series, is an on-site installation that responds to the architecture of the Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains. Kinematope explores the perceptual transformation of the environment through time. This artwork uses light and sound to bring the space into movement. lt deconstructs and rearranges the elements of the cinema machinery to generate a spatial film. The result is an experience based on time that leaves out the camera's mediation, transporting the observer into a virtual time-space whilst preserving the true physical connexions of the body with its environment. As part of the Grand Paris project, he created a nomadic artwork called Gyrotope for the KM1 event on the construction site of the future train station of Fort d'lssy - Vanves - Clamart on the 41h of June 2016. The artwork then went on to be presented in front of the European Parliament in Brussels on the occasion of Nuit Blanche (2016) and on the Bourget construction site in Oc· tober 2018 for the KM4 event for the launch of work on the 16 Line. Pablo Valbuena was awarded with the Audemars Piguet ARCO 2015 Prize.
