Enric Farrés-Duran (Palafrugell, Girona, 1983) is a storyteller in which the real and the fictional end up meeting and modifying each other. His work is articulated through research, coincidences and fortuitous encounters and the possibility of making connections between different places, objects and circumstances. Farrés-Duran creates narratives that reveal hidden and unexpected relationships, which sometimes involve different times and places. The story – narrated and written – plays an essential role in these processes, and the information it provides is essential to be able to approach the process and the connections it establishes. His projects are formalised in installations, commented tours or guided visits and books.
In the same way that the writer Enrique Vila-Matas does not write but rewrites, Farrés-Duran combines and shuffles technical and conceptual strategies while playing with all the cultural baggage he has behind him. The reference to Vila-Matas is not a coincidence, since the artist takes his book París no se acaba nunca and literally makes a fake of it, copying not only the title but also the cover design, with the well-known cream-coloured background that identifies the collection Narrativas Hispánicas by the publisher Anagrama. Formal cloning is the starting point of a series of projects in which, like Vila-Matas (who in turn takes the thread of Hemingway’s novel París era una fiesta, to ironically revisit his days of literary apprenticeship in Paris in the 1970s), the artist invites us on an autobiographical journey in which the true and the false, the plausible and the improbable end up merging. Enric Farrés-Duran’s Paris Never Ends is a project that has so far developed three stages (Paris Never Ends # Poblenou; Paris Never Ends # El Prat and Paris Never Ends # Districte Cinquè), in which the artist starts from a specific place (the Barcelona neighbourhood of Poblenou, the peripheral city of El Prat or the Fifth District, in the El Raval neighbourhood of Barcelona) to establish routes in which as many things are discovered as are hidden and are completed with a book that puts order or contradicts everything that came before.
Thus, Paris Never Ends # Poblenou traces a route based on a coincidence of initials and location, which links Can Felipa, an artistic institution focused on emerging art and a Museum of Contemporary Painting belonging to a private foundation. Enric Farrés-Duran’s proposal mixed elements from both institutions, so that some paintings from the latter were exhibited in a context of emerging art, while the works of some very young artists were shown mixed with more traditional works.
Paris never ends # El Prat, carried out together with Roger Amat-Comellas, brought to light a hilarious journey of connections in which some elements with a designation of origin appear, such as the renowned artichokes from El Prat or the blue-footed chicken, in connection with oversized monuments of the same and found in the United States (because Roger Amat-Comellas’ life circumstances led him to live in the United States), all set to the relaxed music of the 80s, with the group Decibelios and their “Vacaciones en el Prat”. The literal journey took the form of a group trip by coach that the artist titled Viaje al origen.
The third of the Paris Never Ends installments # Districte Cinquè, was produced in the context of the collective exhibition La Realidad Invocable at MACBA. During his wanderings around Barcelona’s Fifth District (which are not without misunderstandings with another fifth district, that of Paris, also a university area) the artist has carried out research whose results are reflected in an installation of inputs and findings in the form of objects, books and other miscellaneous elements. The installation is presented as the setting for a performance to which, as spectators, we have arrived too early and in which we find a shelf with various elements, together with a chair, a plant and a poster, of which we do not know and cannot figure out what role they will play in the plot of a performance that, we imagine, will take place a few moments later. The secret was revealed on June 26, 2014, when, under the title Searching for Enemies, Enric Farrés-Duran conducted a guided tour for a small number of people through some of the places in the fifth district that were important in his own biography: the Faculty of Philosophy, the Massana School, or the studio of the designer Peret, among others. There, former colleagues or collaborators of the artist had the opportunity to discuss and refute his ideas, from a philosophical point of view or in the form of a “settling of scores” that, in essence, demonstrated the intelligence of Farrés-Duran’s position as an artist and his mastery in shaking, shuffling, and handling references, situations and formats.
Farrés-Duran is capable of facing very diverse contexts and bringing them to his own terrain. This is the case of Tres cosas raras, historia de una desaparecido (2013), at the Tàpies Foundation Library, in which, once again, he starts from a biographical element, the incredible discoveries inside books (which he knows well thanks to his work in a second-hand bookshop), to reveal, in the form of a dramatised journey, some of the best kept treasures and secrets of said library.
And the last project, for the moment, that is worth mentioning here is 4 dies sense pati (Four days without a playground) (2014), an intervention at the Josep Pla Foundation in Palafrugell, in which he writes on a wall a quote from the writer Josep Pla: “De vegades pensé en Palafrugell”. Four days without a playground was the punishment that Enric Farrés-Duran had to serve at school for writing with spelling mistakes. In 4 dies sense pati, the artist writes Pla’s quote with an obvious spelling mistake (“begades” instead of “vegades”), a mistake that sparked a lively controversy in the local context and generated clever animated gifs on social media.
With his youthful and carefree air, Enric Farrés-Duran begins stories that combine real events and invented stories, and, as a good narrator, he invites us to follow them and enjoy them, but also to question them and call them into question.
[Article published in Bonart, 2014]
