Christian Boltanski
Label specially made for the exhibition “Shadows” of the artist that took place in La Lonja in Palma de Mallorca during the months of January and February 2015.
There have been only 500 numbered bottles, of which only 100 went on sale, making the bottle a unique object and collector.
Christian Boltanski was born in Paris at the end of World War II, the son of a Christian mother and a Jewish father; So the footprint of the holocaust is present in his work. Self-taught, he began painting at age 14.
Death, life and identity are recurrent themes in his work, which is marked by an intentionality of filing and memory that goes beyond what is explicitly present. Boltanski resorts to fragile materials (old photographs, used clothes, used personal and everyday objects, newspaper clippings, letters, etc.) as testimonies of how brief life is.
“Boltanski evokes in a brutal, convincing, impossible to avoid, that ugly habit that people have to lose face, leaving just the impression of a photograph, a negative whose ash we keep in the windows of consciousness. And it is true, we lose them, we forget them and they are gradually being diluted, as in a collective process of Alzheimer’s disease. Nobody recognizes anyone, we only realize our narrow mental capacity to retain and organize the world, which inexplicably remains without much concern the problem of history or our scrolls to explain. “(Ricardo Bello)