Ivan Abreu @ Greusslich Contemporary
Interview by Nathalie Volcouve
1- When did you discover yourself as an artist?
Most of my family is linked to the sciences: my father is a physicist, my mother a chemist, my grandfather was a doctor and my uncle and cousin are neurosurgeons. Sciences, particularly the more abstract varieties, involve imaginary efforts as does art. Maybe the decision of being an artist emerged from the immature impulse of breaking with that familiar tradition. Anyway, I am grateful for the rigor and respect for knowledge that they breathed into me. These values and processes inform my work.
2- As an artist, what is your obsession?
I enjoy taking advantage of every second in order to materialize my ideas and I try to make my body respond as fast as my mind in this “time trial”.
3- When did you start your first art-sound exhibition?
My first exhibition with sound was in 2004. The piece, called Panoptico, was an intervention within an inhabitable scuplture from the 60’s, and was started because of an invitation from Pero Reyes.
4- What political message do you want us to share in your work?
I am not a political artist. I am an artist with political pieces that generally are connected to the context where the piece is exhibited. There are some places where the complexity of the political arena is too irrefutable and vivid and ignoring it can also be a political act. My work doesn’t give any solution, because that is not the aim of art; but I try to stimulate political subjects, people who think and discuss about political problems. My pieces work with the ideas of the possible and the desirable more than with pointing out the guilty.
5- If you had a “sky’s the limit” budget, what would be your dream project?
I believe in the training of groups from interdisciplinary backgrounds; the potential of a meeting-of-minds, and in organizing collaboration. In fact, now I have a little team that operates as a laboratory of research for the development of pieces. If I had an unlimited budget I would simply like to expand this team.
I am interested in the poetic potential that emerges from the understanding of the possibilities of the contemporary present; the possibility that truth is essentially interdiciplinarity: the crossover between art and other fields of knowledge.
6- What is your next project?
I am working on an exhibition of “Cross Coordinates”, at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, which will be an exhibition of a project I made on the border of Mexico and the US.
7- Which goal would you like to reach?
I would like to go on increasing the significance of my work without it becoming mere platitudes, and I want to explore new contexts in the conception, production and distribution of art pieces.
