Discopatía is an exhibition about musical concepts that combines broken vinyl, painting, collage and a lot of imagination.Made exclusively for Espacio Pático (Murcia, Spain). A multidisciplinary space coordinated by Mamen Navarrete.
It arises from the polysemic idea of feeling that music in general or a record, in particular, can be one of the vertebrae that helps us to stand upright and become the support we need at many moments of our existence. The artist Miriam Martínez Abellán wants the spectator to understand it as an original semantic game between the affection suffered by the intervertebral disc and the vinyl records. In the collection, the state prior to the physical breakage is reflected in the use of multiple pieces of this sound material, which appear scattered throughout each of the works, with apparently improvised but meaningful forms that give unity to the works on display.
Mentally speaking, Discopathy is a disease invented by the artist to identify a pathology produced when you can’t stop listening to a record or a certain musical theme and it becomes something recurrent and obsessive. When the love of vinyl, as a fetish object and as a search for a genuine sound of yesteryear, not comparable to the current digital reproduction formats, ends up being a vital necessity, a «mania» in the eyes of others. It is a question of playing with the similarity between the wear of the anatomical disc and one of the oldest musical supports, which, in the same way, deteriorates the more you listen to it.
To express all this, the technique used has been the collage of images from the 60s and 70s mixed with various objects, as is customary in the author’s personal style. The support used is twofold: on the one hand, wooden circles the size of a record, painted and vitrified with varnish, where the magazine clippings coexist expressively with vinyl remains, representing ideas that revolve around those songs that have been part of the soundtrack of our lives. On the other hand, steel frames with synthetic enamel backdrops, symbolizing musical concepts such as silence, the high-pitched sound, the harpsichord, a glissando or the falsetto. This, in question, embodied by the figure of a politician, a clear example of the act of falsifying the true voice, and a compendium of symbols to be deciphered, always loaded with a certain social criticism and a sense of humour.
Fernando Cuadrado Mulero
Analogical collage, acrylic and recycling on board
30 x 30 cm