Previous image

Next Image

Culture | 15/06/2021

Matteo Guidi exhibits “Regalos Reales” at Harmonia

The artist Matteo Guidi exhibits “Regalos reales” (“Royal Gifts”) at Harmonia, a work based on the curiosity cabinets of European nobles and bourgeois, which proliferated from the 16th century onwards, where they collected and exhibited exotic objects from all over the world. In Guidi’s exhibition, the cabinet of curiosities consists of a recreation of the institutional gifts received by the king and queen and their family.

Matteo Guidi started the cabinet of curiosities in 2018 guided by a list found by chance in a newspaper with a list of gifts received by the king and queen, their daughters, King Juan Carlos and his wife in that year from official activities.

The objects do not form a unitary narrative. The walls of the exhibition hall collect an inventory made up of texts and images that speak of a place, a time or a personal relationship. The artist mounts moving images to allude to things that cannot be retained, that pass before our eyes like imagined objects.

Guidi makes an interpretation of the object and makes everything that is hidden behind a list visible.
“Regalos reales” is an artistic and anthropological research that reflects on the gift, based on Marcel Mauss’s essay The Gift, which talks about how societies are symbolically organised and understand the gift as a social act, and in the act of giving, the act of receiving and returning is implicit.

Matteo Guidi (Cesena, Italy, 1978), linked to the L’H Cultural District, develops a practice that is located at the intersection between contemporary art and social anthropology. From the observation of different social groups or people, he analyses how they relate to their everyday objects, focusing on possible new uses and new symbolisms. The projects are developed in different disciplines such as photography, drawing, video or installation.

He has participated in exhibitions, festivals and biennials such as the CCCC Valencia, Tecla Sala Art Centre, Lo Pati Art Centre, the Suñol Foundation, the Santa Monica Art Centre, Ok.Video.Festival in Jakarta and the Magasin Centre d’Art Contemporain, among others.

The exhibition “Regalos reales”, curated by Zaida Trallero, can be visited from 17 June to 5 September.