Compañía Magnética. QUAM
Montesquiu's Fortnight of Art (QUAM) is a program to support the new generations of artists and art critics who work in three different but highly interrelated fields: training, help in the creation and dissemination of the work.
The training area is attended by the call for summer workshops in the Montesquiu castle and, as of this autumn, in other places of Catalonia, in which the young artist or the art critic can share Or confront practices and ideas with prominent professionals. The scope of the creation aid is specified in the material resources and the new technology that QUAM makes available to its participants to develop their projects or perform their works. Finally, in the field of dissemination, itinerant exhibitions are organized or publications are published, the purpose of which is to make the works and texts developed during the course of the workshops accessible to the public, or -com has been happening lately- the work produced subsequently and under the impact or as a consequence of the proposals of research and experimentation posed in the workshops. In this sense, we can mention exhibitions or publications such as Art Esquiu, I.R.P.F (Idea, Reflection, Process or Final) or La Casa Calenta y Seca.
The QUAM edition of 1993 included a workshop - one of the most interesting of those held in Montesquiu in recent years - directed by Pep Agut (Terrassa, 1961). Under the statement << Crisis of the image, crisis of the represented worlds >>, Agut implied to the participants of his workshop in a debate on a problem that acts as the generating nucleus of his own production: the inability -the failure- of the conventional artistic languages to give a form to the contemporary experience. The image - by itself - no longer represents, it is fraught with frivolity due to the influence of the media. From this premise the artist -the frustrated painter- will have to define new elaboration strategies and new devices that return their transformative capacity to art.
Martí Ansón, Helena Cabello, Gemma Clofent, Maria Cusachs, Rosa Galicia, Begoña Muñoz, Servand Solanilla and Pep Agut continue the debate begun in July 1993 at Montesquiu. Given that each of them lives in different places / Fraga, Terrassa, Bilbao, Madrid, Mataró, Barcelona ...) now they are related by letter or meet sporadically. They spend a long weekend in the Lleida Pyrenees, take advantage of an afternoon in Madrid during the ARCO fair or a few hours before or after one of them opens an exhibition. The process of constitution as a group and the same debate that cohesiona suggests or generates a series of images or products (exchanged letters, photographs or schematics ...) that are used as a basic material for their interventions: this The same catalog or the installation of the Chapel are two examples. It is, therefore, interventions or devices that question the viewer and make him participate in the debate. They have given a name: Magnetic Company.