Bunga began his career linked to painting, although he soon expanded his interests to other artistic disciplines that allowed him to question architecture as a language of power, and other inertias rooted in it, such as order or solidity, voluntarily dispensing with traditional materials and betting by the precariousness of some structures composed only of cardboard sheets and adhesive tape.
"Against the Extravagance of Desire" continues this line of research: the changing environment that surrounds the Palace that hosts the exhibition, as well as the context in which it was originally built, make up some of the keys to this new work.
Bunga opens a new dimension for the experience of a viewer who not only contemplates the work but enters and transforms it. The cardboard structure is like a phantasmagorical metaphor for the excluded and the unregulated that blends in with the Palacio de Cristal itself, giving rise to a hybrid space.
In the installation, Carlos Bunga brings stories outside the spotlight to public attention, as he did in his recent project Home (2022) for the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, but he also blurs the boundary between interior and exterior, making the building a participant in the external environment, a constantly changing natural cycle that defines and conditions it. Moreover, nature vindicates its space in the cardboard construction and raises its voice through the leaves trapped in the paint.
"Against the Extravagance of Desire" continues this line of research: the changing environment that surrounds the Palace that hosts the exhibition, as well as the context in which it was originally built, make up some of the keys to this new work.
Bunga opens a new dimension for the experience of a viewer who not only contemplates the work but enters and transforms it. The cardboard structure is like a phantasmagorical metaphor for the excluded and the unregulated that blends in with the Palacio de Cristal itself, giving rise to a hybrid space.
In the installation, Carlos Bunga brings stories outside the spotlight to public attention, as he did in his recent project Home (2022) for the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, but he also blurs the boundary between interior and exterior, making the building a participant in the external environment, a constantly changing natural cycle that defines and conditions it. Moreover, nature vindicates its space in the cardboard construction and raises its voice through the leaves trapped in the paint.
«"Against the Extravagance of Desire" is an attitude of resistance informed by all the material that surrounds us and takes us farther and farther away from the spiritual essence which ought to reign in our lives. This project is an invitation to think with me of other ways of existing, being and inhabiting amidst the duality we live in.»
Carlos Bunga
The installation cites the majesty of the elements that make up the building located in the Parque del Retiro and the precariousness of the cardboard used by the artist for the construction of his work. The Palacio de Cristal (‘Crystal Palace’) was built by Ricardo Velázquez Bosco in 1887 as part of the complex of buildings erected for the General Exhibition of the Philippine Islands, held the same year.
It was built as a greenhouse for housing botanical specimens from the Philippine archipelago, but most of these failed to survive the long sea voyage, making it necessary to rustle up new contents to justify the construction of the building with its innovative iron and glass architecture, the result of technical progress and the availability of the new materials made possible by the all-out industrialization of the 19th century. Projects like this were an architectural triumph begun by Joseph Paxton with his greenhouse for Chatsworth (1837-1840) and his subsequent Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London.
Among other advantages, the system of construction with prefabricated elements allowed the building to be put together and dismantled very quickly, which suited the intrinsically ephemeral nature of events like the World Expositions, greatly in vogue at that time. In the same way, Carlos Bunga has built his ephemeral interior architecture taking into account the climatic and conservation conditions that are so particular to the Palace, which may affect the installation itself and which will be dismantled when its exhibition is over, as was the case with the pavilions of the events mentioned above.
