GRADO ZERO

Exhibition commisioned by Ministero Di Cultura Italiana a Barcellona, during the Barcellona Design Week

Curated by La Cube


Color is a visual experience inevitably linked to sociocultural factors. Each color has a meaning of which we are more or less conscious, and their presence in clothing, spaces and objects generates different connotations depending on the context. In an almost instinctive way, we link certain values with certain colors, associating them with traditions, impulses or ideologies. In the specific case of white, it is usually linked to principles related to purity, neutrality or aseptic. Also with the classic, a concept constructed with the discourses of balance, elegance and moderation. Throughout this process, the value of white has been both a construction in itself and an element for the construction of other values. If the value associated with classicism dominated through architecture and sculpture, the production of spaces with an aspiration to relevance, one of the most important contemporary values of white within art is that of neutrality and neutrality. the purity, taken beyond its own culmination, generating the white as a non-value color. White as a mean to say that nothing is being said, to generate neutral, impartial spaces that leave room for the values of others, for other contents. The white of the cube-white. But is that white really empty? what is it really communicated when trying to say nothing? What hides the white? And if we transfer the spatial values of the white to the objectual, what readings can be done about the objects? By depriving them (supposedly) of chromatic value, do they become neutral and meaningless? Or are they, almost automatically, classified as clean, elegant and classic? Is the white really the zero degree? Grado Zero has been designed as a visual journey that aims to generate a reflection on the perceptive features and visual conclusions that we can draw from these objects. The objective of this exhibition is to propose, through a series of pieces made by different designers, how the receptive criteria of a shape or texture change, and what values take on relevance once the chromatic impact is eliminated.

Photos: Jaime Corro