In the video "Dust to Dust", Jaime Pitarch (Barcelona, 1963) sweeps, before the fixed plane of the camera, in an empty and abandoned industrial space. The video opens the moment the sweeping begins to the final movement, when the dust - that is subsequently suspended in the air, obscuring the entire screen - returns to rest again in its original state.
Jaime Pitarch trained in London (M.A. Painting, Royal College of Art, London [1993-95]; B.A. Painting Chelsea College of Art, London, 1990-93). In his works he uses photography, video, sculpture, drawing or installation. The underlying thread that appears throughout his work in the last years has been his obsession with the subject of order, not seen as a classification system, but as a symptom of desire to control reality. Pitarch explores the possibility of tying the order of the "physical things" with other more abstract orders (political, economic, etc.) and his object-intallations review the way in which these "physical things" can be echoes of a reality that does not “fit” and which disorients/disconcerts us.
Artist statement
In the widest sense, my work has to do with the human being's inability to identify with the structures he himself has created. The sense of loss or inadequacy he feels when faced with these structures (whether we call them culture, setting, society, or whatever) moves man to interpret the world, and himself, constantly and intuitively in order to try to insert himself into it.
This futile action modifies peoples' destinies. I see this act as something of great beauty. In my work, I use elements fabricated by man, inhabited by man, or elements that have helped man to construct an idea of himself, and of what the world is.
I tend to dismember and reconstruct these elements. The distance between the original object and the new object, often dysfunctional, acts as a reflection of the space between the original being and the person, between collective structures and our limited adaptation to or identification with them. The new object tends to express the loss of the person, and as a result, his need to keep standing even though it might only be to prove that, in essence, he is still holding onto what was given to him, and what indicates that he still IS.
This explains a certain obsession with the theme of order (ordering is the prerequisite for interpreting) and the fact that most of the actions carried out in my work are sometimes futile, or present their elements in a situation of equilibrium or precariousness. A futility or precariousness, however, in which I try to produce echoes of the beauty that encompasses the reiterated act of loss and self-affirmation.
Jaime Pitarch, December 2005
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