Ester Partegàs’ (La Garriga, 1972) career began to take shape outside Spain with good critical reception, a momentum which facilitated the presentation of her projects in our country. Since her first exhibitions in the late nineties, Partegàs has developed a theme that explores the urban landscape of the consumer society. A multidisciplinary artist, she easily moves between drawing, painting, sculpture and installation, although in the formal development of her work, volumetric and spatial aspects persist which lead to a definition of the artist as a sculptor. In many of her pieces, Partegàs expresses her interest in the power of the word and its confrontation with the realm of the image. In this way the artist rearranges advertising messages and proposes an unnerving reading of public billboards or covers the heads of passers-by with branded bags, nullifying their identity. At other times she places the spectator in the waiting room of an airport and thus represents a 'no place' to nowhere.
With Invaders, a project created specifically for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Productions Programme and under a suggestive title of movie, somewhere between horror and science fiction, Partegàs subverts the plot, the invaders are not the others, but human beings themselves, generated from a debris that invades the surroundings. The brightly coloured images painted on methacrylates are not the other side of the pop icon coin, but something more distressing; they carry a sense of loss, of contempt towards something important that is abandoned in some corner of the city, and which layer by layer manages to build the landscape that contemporary humans inhabit.
The exhibition begins with Eclipse (2007), the sculptural image of a bush, a reference that has already been used by the artist on other occasions but in a more geometric and constructive form. In this case the tree is more realistic, emphasising the concept of landscape proposed by the installation and by the projecting of a mood with the invasion of the surroundings. The tree suggests decline, it is bare and dirty. It is a mutant tree, almost android, eclipsed by something that is pervasive. An image of this overrated civilization, which is the artist’s field of exploration.
