Inventory of Love: Joan Pallé

In the exhibition Inventory of Love artist Joan Pallé shows for the first time part of the research he has conducted on the representations of non-monogamous relationships in cinema.

 
The project focuses on films that have approached concepts such as open relationships, ménage à trois, and orgies. From Design for living (1933, Ernst Lubitsch), to Jules et Jim (1962, François Truffaut) or Lions love (1969, Agnès Varda) to the new Netflix series, She's gonna have it (2017, Spike Lee –based on the homonymous Lee’s first film ) or Wonderlust (2018, Luke Snellin, Lucy Tcherniak); we see a wide range of film productions that have delved into these ideas.

The project tries to carry out a multidisciplinary visual essay referencing the portrayals of non-monogamous relationships within films, analyzing their emancipatory potential and the deficiencies and naiveties that they may show. With that in mind, the research seeks to use visual material already in circulation, to assign them a new reading that allows a better understanding and approach towards the configurations of other relationships in contemporary urban societies.

To achieve this, the artist bases his research on the paradoxical premise that these representations do not portray the world but shape it. In that way, reality strives to mimic its alleged representation and not these portrayals that try to adjust to such reality. Thus, cinema is unmasked as a social engineering device that drastically codifies human relationships.

In this exhibition, we find different formal exercises that use research materials as raw matter in their production. On the one hand, it uses printed material distributed by the film industry and collected by the artist over the last year: flyers, posters, movie tickets, or magazines that show a patina of cinephile fascination almost fetishistic while providing historical value. Here the images are shown as tools that help clarify the visual mechanisms that define the models and limits of human relationships.
On the other hand, and following his recent line of projects, the artist experiments with small-format sculpture as a narrative resource. In this case, he produces a series of figurative sculptures that directly references specific scenes of the selected films.

Finally, the staging of the exhibition space gives the project an almost theatrical dimension that offers the subjective vision and the gesture of the artist when approaching these fictional films.