Solid that Melts in the Air.
Solo show. Espais Volart. Fundació Vila Casas.
September 2025 – march 2026
Toni Giró’s artistic work, under the guise of an overflowing eclecticism, is distinguished by the deep cultivation of a dissident critical theory. It is a production that is inserted into the turbulent and changing world of the “end of history” that never took place. For more than three decades, the artist has had the sagacity to capture the postmodern mutation by generating devices and scenarios of thought that affect the paradoxes, contradictions and deficiencies of the “worlds of life” in an era that is experienced as an unattainable continuous present.
This creative universe is therefore based on a broad and varied aesthetic deployment, which is supported by highly endowed artisanal capacities. However, the skills in the formal execution of the works do not result in some overwrought gadgets. On the contrary, formalism is inseparable from a contextual, sometimes performative way of doing things, in which the works act as prostheses that open avenues of protesting reflection.
Faced with the overwhelming and rampant acceleration of the uninterrupted flow of images and commodities, these artistic productions are based, on the one hand, on an ironic and symbolic use of the trap as self-defense and distancing and, on the other, on a Benjaminian perspective of obsolescence –be it social and cultural projects, be it technologies– which is conceived as the catalyst for questioning the prevailing mainstream. Art, in the hands of Toni Giró, is an insurgent intellectual operation that flees from the pamphlet, but that does not renounce politics and the challenge of consensual passivity.
Jordi Font i Agulló
Historian and curator