The exhibition Anthony McCall. Solid light and Performance works, which forms a story through the artist's career, proposes to verify how the nexus in his works has been performance and the film essentially conceived as a modulation of light in space and time. And how his works and ideas developed during the seventies dialogue with his current work, reopening an interesting and rich conceptual terrain, with significant differences in the temporal dimension between them.
The film as a medium, apart from all narrative and understood rather as a pure language, together with the development of the performance throughout its career, focuses the exhibition narrative that will be presented at the Pozu Santa Bárbara and at the MCC de Mieres and seeks collect the imaginary that underlies the artist's work from his first filmic works on performance such as Landscape for Fire (1972) to the presentation of the solid light Face to Face II (2013). The exhibition proposal simultaneously maintains the idea that space and time belong to the same moment as that of the one who contemplates them at that particular moment.
Throughout the rooms of the MCC will be displayed a block of pieces made up of the filmic works of the 70s Landscape for a Fire (1972), a seven-minute film based on the performance Landscape for Fire II made in North Weald. In Circulation Figures (1972) McCall invited fifteen individuals to represent an event whose spectacular nature was magnified by two huge mirrors between which the action took place. The photographs and films that were made during the event reveal the performative aspect of the photographers and cameras, while the use of the Polaroid camera made it possible to incorporate photography in situ. Five Minute Drawing (1974) is a performance of the artist while making a drawing.
At the Pozu Santa Bárbara, Face to Face II will be presented , his first work with two facing screens. The beams of light caused by the uninterrupted projection of the drawings in continuous movement define a space, a place to experiment. The planes of light seem to have solidity, even after the hand confirms that this impression is illusory, the mind continues to work the planes with some respect, as if they were walls.
The exhibition shows that McCall immerses himself in an individual, changing ideology that favors differences and not homogeneity, and that he responds to the aesthetic imperative in the sense of creation and not of beauty, through the expansion of the concept of sculpture and the revision of the idea of performance.