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Who, when and how (unknow)
Original title: Quién, cuándo o cómo (desconocidos)
1995
Wood construction, electrical equipment, rope, chair, table and 4 colour photographs
Dimensions: Main structure: 241 x 130 x 130 cm
4 photographs: 128 x 126 cm each
Reference: ACF0022
In the early nineties, after settling in New York, Badiola returned to his own models to change their scale, materials or configuration. The sculptor, who claims to hate formalism, turns form into a vehicle for branching, indeterminate meanings which travel through the spectator's awareness; in the end, they belong to his understanding.
Since the mid-nineties Badiola has gradually accentuated the narrative contents of his work, while the elements and materials used in his sculptures have multiplied. To the metals and wood he added multimedia techniques and, most significantly, non-naturalist photography, the result of dramatised performances fragmented in takes that opened up different possibilities of equivocal reading. A type of photographic work that can be set in the context of the work done at the time by Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas or James Coleman.
All the pieces Badiola has done since then come within that framework and are all tinged with a halo of melancholy, a sure realisation of the impossibility of human agreement and interrelation. Good proof of that are his titles which, though they have always been crucial to an understanding of his output, are now even channels for his civic intention. Such is the case with Complot de familia. Segunda versión, done between 1993 and 1995 -which takes its title from the 1987 Family Plots, whose focal point is Arne Jacobsen's chair, and which continue with Recent Family Plot, 1992, with its reminiscences of Malevich- and also in Quién, cuándo, cómo (desconocidos), in which Jacobsen's chair and the different zones are connected by a rope and the photographs show people of different races and sexes in motionless tragic scenes.