Antonio Girbes: Refugios

As part of the cultural activities of Benedicti Claustra Onlus and in conjunction with the 2016 Biennale of Architecture in Venice, in the Officina dell’Arte Spirituale exhibition space at the Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore, Spanish artist Antonio Girbes presents Refugios , a site specific installation comprised of thirteen large-scale works.

Refugios is the brainchild of Delirious City, a series of works from 2006 in which the artist brought together photographic images of buildings by renowned architects in several European cities.
Over the years all of these images generated the Delirious City project, a new and different space, a global, timeless city, in which the architectural elements created by man over the centuries coexist together simultaneously.
Andrea Palladio, Pere Compte, Fritz Wotruba and Félix Candela are some of the seminal names encountered on this journey through the history of art, a fitting tribute to the extraordinary heritage that these great artists have left us.
Refugios eschews the typical two-dimensional quality of photography by making use of perspective to create illusions of impossible depths through which the eye is plunged into an unreal yet highly realistic three-dimensionality.

Among the works specifically created for the Venetian exhibition, in the year of the Jubilee of Mercy, the piece aptly titled mercy stands out. This artwork is a large mosaic on the floor of one of the rooms of the exhibition venue in which each of the pieces shows the detail of a selected snapshot of the most significant works in the history of art. Painting, sculpture, drawing and photography are the sources of this great black and white composition representing the quest of every individual, man or woman, for a safe space, a quiet and serene sanctuary. A refuge to shore us up against the immensity and chaos of the outside world.

The entire exhibition is a tribute to Art as a form of expression, but also the common denominator the whole human race shares in its search for order and harmony, as the creators of places where safety and beauty infuse the human being with calm and serenity. Art, therefore, is the universal Refuge sheltering all mankind.