YOU HAFE TO EAT IT ALL
You have to eat everything. The last divorce of the century. Insults in Parliament. The acquitted scammers. The watch/car/cream that will change your life. The Drink of Happiness. You have to eat everything. Videos of Tiktok, YouTube and Instagram. Cats on WhatsApp. Influencers and influenced. Wars, famines, and the dead. The showbiz of coated paper and television sets.
We live hyperconnected, bombarded by thousands of images and messages. Speed, instantaneity and fragmentation characterize the way we approach information.
T’ho has de menjar tot (You have to eat it all) is a reflection on how this access to information, immediacy and hyperconnectivity make us omnivorous phagocytists unable to establish conscious filters, to build our own criteria or to link us affectively with the information that bombards us. This overabundance can lead us to superficiality, to desist from interior construction, to banish spiritual fact, to feel falsely full.
In the noble hall of a bourgeois palace we find an exquisite table. On the white porcelain, 28 cobblestones await their diners. The hardness of the granite and the delicacy of the white porcelain violate the visitor.
Agustín Laguna incorporates collage on stone, appropriating cuts to newspapers, advertising and magazines. The collages are incomplete. They are images that prevent us from grasping their totality and, for this reason, they become universal. This fragmentation is also a constant in his work. A resource used to abstract us from the tangible and to seek what is essential.
Every day we digest with indifference and normality, images and stories as indigestible as granite. They are broken, incomplete, and manipulated. The installation invites us to ask ourselves how we approach all this information. To ask ourselves about the apathy caused by the accumulation of data to which we cannot link, and the indifference to the oversaturation of stimuli and constant excitement.
The installation highlights this silent and constant aggression, and invites us to ask ourselves: Should we swallow everything?
Agustín Laguna
Agustín Laguna (1963) is an artist who combines the search for beauty and truth in his works with the delicacy and courage of an acrobat without a network.
In his projects he uses engraving, drawing and superimposition of fragmented papers to reflect on the need to look for the essential beyond the visible.
Graduated in Art History from the Complutense University of Madrid, he deepened his artistic training in the engraving workshop of Sara Quintero and Alberto Pina. For years he has been investigating the possibilities of paper not only as a support for his works, but as pictorial material in itself.
