South likes: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Parque del Retiro, Madrid

South likes: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Parque del Retiro, Madrid
Splendide Hotel
Crystal Palace, Parque del Retiro, Madrid, Spain
13 March – 19 October, 2014

Text by Michelangelo Corsaro

Organised by the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, the Splendide Hotel realised by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster develops a scenario halfway between a large-scale installation and a narration of literary fiction. Taking advantage of the suggestive venue of the Palacio de Cristal, the French artist designed an environment charged with references from a forgotten past. Almost contemporarily to the construction of the Crystal Palace by Ricardo Velázquez Bosco, Arthur Rimbaud mentioned the Splendide Hôtel in one of his poems (“…And the Splendide Hôtel was built in the chaos of ice and night of the Pole”). Also inaugurated in the same year, the Hotel Splendide in Lugano is referenced by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster as a summer resort where Proust used to spend his summer with his parents. Shrouded in this complex array of literary references, the installation presented in Madrid replicates the original architecture of the building. Above the entrance, a sign in big green letters composing the name SPLENDIDE HOTEL welcomes the visitors. Inside the carpeted floor evokes the hotel atmosphere, while a series of rocking-chairs invite visitors to read books selected by the artist to create a narrative journey through the words of José Rizal, Dostoyevsky, Rubén Darío, H.G. Wells and Vila-Matas. Playing with the nostalgic feeling of once-magnificent buildings such as the Palacio de Cristal, the installation of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster inquires the ambivalence of our experience of architecture, caught between memories that we have never lived and a dormant imagery settled down deep in our aesthetic conscience.

http://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/exhibitions/dominique-gonzalez-foerster