Site-specific intervention at MataderoMadrid, Spain.
September 9th – 19th, 2010.
Curated by David Armengol.
Commissioned by La Noche en Blanco.
“(…) Maximalism is a new episode of the Multiple Mountain series, a long-term project that has led the artist to investigate —and translate into artistic language (from drawing to monumental installation)— the most difficult mountaineering routes of the eight-thousanders (the fourteen highest mountains on the planet). A strenuous work, symbolically close to the glorious although useless effort of the climber in the deed of climbing mountains that, for Fresneda, implies a metaphor about the complexity, perseverance, discouragement and overexertion that art practice implies.
Specifically, Maximalism has supplemented a further degree of difficulty to the project: to make each one of the routes and to document the entire experience. In order to do so, the artist has had the collaboration of an experienced mountaineer and a whole technical team; an unusual material within artistic processes, but that has served to undertake the absurd accomplishment of climbing an iron sculpture.
Definitely, Maximalism plays with the epic of the conquest to, without contemplation, to bring us back to the harsh reality that defines the transience of success”.
—David Armengol, 2010.
Originally published in La Gesta Imposible – La Noche en Blanco, MataderoMadrid. September 9th – 19th, 2010.
