On Saturday, 24 October, at 19:00, the Cal Massó Art Centre in Reus will open the exhibition "things, from afar, are blue" by artist Albert Gironès. This exhibition is the third and penultimate show in the Paradigmas cycle, a contemporary visual arts programme aimed at fostering new relationships with contemporary art through experience, conversation, and context-building.
The exhibition will be open to the public from 23 October to 7 November, on Fridays and Saturdays from 10:30 to 13:30 and from 17:00 to 20:00, except for Friday, 23 October, when it will only open in the afternoon. Additionally, on Friday, 6 November, at 19:00, Gironès will conduct a guided active visit.
Featuring six works created between 2020 and 2026, the exhibition includes two pieces that are being shown for the first time. Despite their individual autonomy, all the works share a common research theme: the mechanisms of perception, the interpretation of optical phenomena, and the construction of extraordinary narratives.
The title of the exhibition refers to the optical phenomenon where distant objects appear bluish due to the atmosphere between the eye and the landscape. This effect, described by Leonardo da Vinci in relation to aerial perspective, was later revisited by Rebecca Solnit in her 2005 work "A Field Guide to Getting Lost" as a metaphor for distance, uncertainty, and imagination.
Mountains such as Miramar (Alt Camp), the Mussara (Baix Camp), Puig Major (Mallorca), Mont Podbrdo (Bosnia and Herzegovina), the Brocken (Germany), Emei (China), and the virtual Mount Chiliad have served as both fieldwork locations and spaces where atmospheric phenomena, legends, mystical experiences, simulations, and fictions converge. Rather than mere backdrops, they act as devices through which to observe how perception constructs meaning.
Albert Gironès, born in Valls in 1995, is a visual creator and researcher who engages in multidisciplinary processes to explore landscape, light, and natural phenomena suggestive of symbolic, scientific, or spiritual projections. He also examines the social implications of these phenomena, integrating fieldwork with scientific research, sociological analysis, and experimentation. Committed to communicating the content of artistic production, Gironès is also involved in pedagogy and communication.
This year's edition of the Paradigmas cycle features Gironès's latest works, which reflect his ongoing exploration of visual and optical phenomena associated with light effects, atmospheric contingencies, and their connections to spirituality and religious or magical beliefs. The initial theme of the cycle was the eclipse, the sensitive exploration of earth and oceans, meteorological phenomena, and a turn towards spiritualism, now expanding to include spiritual and magical considerations of natural phenomena and beyond.
