They’re Not All Funny, But They’re in a Row

Including an installation with car bonnets and five new laser pieces, the works in the show could be read as a comment on the myth of the ‘persistence of vision’ – the belief that human perception of motion is the result of an afterimage persisting on the eye’s retina for approximately one twenty-fifth of a second.

Now proven wrong, the theory has been used throughout history to explain the phenomenon of the perception of movement by the human eye in cinematography. In this light, the links between the pieces in the show could be described as focusing on the very simple but significant fact of the limitations of human perception: ‘the reason we are able to perceive movement in a movie is the same reason that results in the crashing of a car’.

The work of Rubén Grilo unfolds over a wide range of media, including installation, vector graphics, archive material and PowerPoint presentations.

His works often play with the contradictions between the quality of the work as pure information and the specific qualities of its physical media with which the work is realized, and by doing so combines the questioning of the assumptions of conceptual art practices with a persistent process of rationalization throughout the display.