ORIOL VILANOVA
Manresa, Barcelona, Spain, 1980
Received the Fundación Botín Art Grant in 2015

If night was a color, 2017
Collection of 700 postcards featuring nightscapes
10 x 15 cm each
Dimensions variable
Acquired in 2018

The work of Oriol Vilanova is rooted in collecting and classifying artefacts, with a specific interest in postcards. His method is akin to that of an archaeologist. He brings together found objects, using the context of the exhibition to examine their status, while also rethinking how forms of displays covertly affect the comprehension of each single image and then as part of a whole.

Postcards exacerbate the clichéd vision one may have of a place and, in that sense, are a testimony to how tourism tends to oversimplify the world to make it more decipherable, more consumable. What may appear neutral is in fact telling of how a culture chooses to represent itself. Exhibited as a whole, these collections become meta-images, with each unit acting as a kind of pixel or building block.