Last days | Stephen Dean’s individual exhibition

Entitled “Juggler”, 14 pieces are spread across the walls of the gallery’s ground floor. This series is made with dichroic glass disks – a material created by NASA for the spacial suits helmet displays – on top of a brown kraft paper or black aluminium paper. These geometric compositions, deceptively simple, sometimes look like masks from an archaic time, sometimes like minimalist expressions of a hidden reality. The almost rectangular works present the disks in groups of three and, like small windows that connect us with the world of colour, the glass changes accordingly to light and movement of the visitor. Already acquainted with characteristics of the material, Stephen Dean explores possibilities of this rare technic media juxtaposing the complex pieces of changing colour with an ordinary wrapping paper. Thanks to the contrast of these materials, the visitor’s attention is directly focused on the mirage of tones. The visitor’s eye is tied to a hypnotic artifact of unstable qualities in which only colour remains.

On the gallery’s first floor, the celebration of colour continues with the video “Olé”, parte of the series “Fever” (2009-2013). The artist, who always records scenes of strong ritualisitic load, combines images of bullfights in San Fermines. The thermal cameras used by the artist are the same ones used in medicine and by the military. With the increasing anxiety of pandemics and terrorism, the thermal cameras come to detect presence of body fever. In the era of globalisation, these cameras are also instruments of war, repression and vigilance, for they are tools to “make space borders back down” and add knowledge to “make the visible, invisible”. This same tool is what allows Stephen Dean to make art – and even abstract art. Under the thermal camera lens, these images lose their figurative quality and become red, yellow, green and blue moving smudges, pure artistic material.