The one piece i was particularly interested in by this artist is called "The Neck" unfortunately i couldn't find an image of it anywhere. It was a performance made in a garden where a octagonal platform was built onto a tall tree which could be viewed from a nearby window. Everyday for eight days the artist climbed a ladder to the platform, removed one of his eight pieces of clothing and walked an increasing number of times around the trunk of the tree. As the days went on and the articles of clothing built up it began to form a kind of nest. It was based around idea of being able to approach god through ritual activity involving divestment of goods and above all preconceptions. This ritual ceremony was an empty gesture, which echoed the purifying and punishing rituals of medieval monks and hermits.
I like the private and public aspects of this performance. The way that the act is a solitary one made for quite deeply personal reasons but that it is open for others to see. A quote from the book i read on Pepe Espaliu put this nicely "As Bueys said, the only way to improve and perhaps to heal is to become aware and show ones wounds."
A lot of the work reflected this idea. The artist suffered from HIV and Aids and used his experiences of life with illness to create art... "the art made through his illness was a search for elusive forms and to capture emotional and existential states."
"The empty cage is not the prison but the body itself"
Another series of performances that seek to capture these elusive emotional states, took place with the artist being carried down the street by two members of the public. taking reference in the bible stories of Jesus carrying peter across the water. It makes a childhood game into a meaningful communication, where the carrier becomes the carried.
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