"Poetics of Destruction" by Laia Noal in the Lab36 gallery

Since last January 12, you can visit the new exhibition at the Lab36 gallery in Barcelona entitled Poetics of Destruction by Laia Noal, winner of the 2021 Nasevo Prize of the Ernesto Ventós Foundation.

According to Noal, Poetics of Destruction is a project in which I reflect on the relationship that humans maintain with nature through the landscape, exploring how we perceive it, represent it, fragment it, artificialize it and destroy it”.

According to the artist, perception is linked to the way we process the landscape from a human perspective. We always start from our body in the space arranged by gravity, understanding that there is one above and one below which is immovable. But this perception can be transformed depending on the way in which we position our body when contemplating the landscape, being able to alter the way we perceive it and, therefore, represent it.

Noal believes that another of the elements that determines how we perceive it, are the images, ideas, and conceptions that we have inherited from tradition. They condition what we understand by landscape, the way we observe it and the expectations we have of it; leading us to an idealization that we could call the "postal effect".

Laia Noal tells us that there are several ways to represent the landscape and approach it from different ways. According to the artist, the first thing he does is make the landscape vertical, breaking with the traditional horizontal format. In the second place, he does not represent a recognizable landscape, but uses elements present in the same landscape that intervene in his work. Another element present in the works of the exhibition is linked to artificialization. This leads her to conclude that what we understand by natural landscape has ceased to exist, "because such is the degree of human intervention on a visible and invisible scale on the natural environment, that we have ended up transforming natural landscapes into artificial ones". says Laia Noal.

On the other hand, there is a part of the exhibition dedicated to fires. On a visual and poetic scale, the artist works on them based on the relationship established with a spatial landscape, as if that space of destruction were connected to the universe. "But at the same time that it becomes a space of destruction and death, it also contains all the potentiality of life, since in the burned lands plant life ends up springing up again and the first to do so are the "weeds": the seed of the next forest and perhaps of the future", points out Noal.

Laia Noal (1985) was born in Barcelona, a city where she continues to reside. In 2008 he graduated with a degree in Humanities specializing in Art History from Pompeu Fabra University, and in 2019 he graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona. Since 2012, he has participated in various exhibitions, and in 2021 he received the NASEVO Award from the Ernesto Ventós Foundation

Laia Noal's work revolves around the investigation of our relationship with nature, focusing on the construction we make of the landscape and the dialogue we establish with the environment.