Interview with Gonzalo Elvira for the 2020 City of Palma Antoni Gelabert Prize for Visual Arts

The artist Gonzalo Elvira (Patagonia, Argentina, 1971) has been awarded the Ciutat de Palma Antoni Gelabert Award for Visual Arts 2020 for his Dream installation. Former recipients of this award include artists such as N.ria G.ell and Carles Congost. From RocioSantaCruz, we celebrate with emotion the recognition of Elvira, whose vision and sensitivity are a reference in the field of artistic creation.Elvira traces a journey through the ignote cartography of the dream.Somnis rescues stories of the fog, of this thick, infinite fog that is the unconscious. The artist took as his starting point the illustrations that Grete Stern, a German photographer, a member of the Bauhaus and exiled in Argentina, created for the magazine Idilli. The publication offered his readers a psychological consulting exercise of dream interpretation. The section soon became a sort of surrealist archive, a repository of mobs, desires, and contradictions, to which Stern accompanied with enigmatic illustrations.He would resurrect the voices of these women, he plunged into a maze of alien fears and longings to give them a new life. His compositions not only reflect the distorted reality of these stories, but give them new meanings, mixing the past and the present, the dream and the reality, the stroke and the word. In his own words, Dreams allows a “movement to certain phenomena that have recently taken place in the reality of the world that we’re living in.”The artist strips the illustrations of his original context and reproduces them on ancient maps: the woman who looks to the sky in “Ambition Dreams”, sitting on the American East; the woman who moves on to the palpentas in “The Geometry Dreams”, opening her way through Western Europe. In each image, a contained story, a voice that crosses time and space. For each of them, a piece of world.