"I was here" F. G-T

Untitled (Placebo), 1991

FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES

1957 born in Guaimaro, Cuba, 1996 died in Miami, USA

"Felix Gonzalez-Torres works invest the most mundane materials (candy, clocks, lightbulbs) and common-place processes (off-set printing, photography) with a preciousness and poetry to convey both the rational values of life and its inevitable transience. His large stacks of sheets of paper printed with a text or image, or lines and carpets of glittering gold-wrapped candies, resemble the stable structures of minimalism, but are in state of constant transformation as the andience is invited to take a piece of paper or candy away and the piles gradually shrink. There are discrete references to his personal history in titles, or in details such as the weight of the golden candy in Untitled (Placebo), 1991, which equals the combined weight of the artist and his lover; but no didactic explanation is given and the audience is free to bring its own personnal associations into play in the construction of meaning.
In Untitled, 1991, a tender and intimate image of a recently slept in bed is displayed in the most public manner on huge billboards across New York City. This personal elegy to the death of his lover from AIDS becomes an eloquent and universal expression of love, beauty, tragedy and loss."

By discovering these works, I was happy, I was sad, I was in love...