EL OLIVO

"In the olive groves, the humanization of the wild is total. In fact, nowadays the cultivation and extraction of olives is produced by highly sophisticated industrial exploitation techniques. This means that technology, understood in all its meanings, dominates each of the stages of an olive farm, banishing almost all of those actions that kept it subordinated to the ancestral idea of land, to the physical action of men on the land... However, this does not mean that the olive grove has lost an iota of its weight in the foundational narrative of local identity.

This paradox fuels the work that the artist Claudio Zulian presents in Paradeisos. His proposal consists on the portrait of an olive tree. He has approached it with all the keys of the genre: staging, artificial lighting, and more. And the result is a film that is projected in the exhibition hall at an approximate scale of a real olive tree. The artifice of the operation, which does not intend anything other than to banish precisely that idea of purity or wild state that often adheres to the representation of the subject, is further enhanced in the post-production process of the piece." - Óscar Fernández López.

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Piece for the exhibition Paradeisos. Cultures of oil and contemporary art, presented at the Casa de la Merced in Córdoba (Spain) in December 2010; commissioned by Diputación de Córdoba.