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Interview with MP & MP Rosado |
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MP & MP Rosado are exhibiting, for the first time, an individual project in Barcelona, prepared especially for the Santa Mònica Art Centre; although it is difficult to speak of individuality because the initials MP & MP correspond to the twin Rosado brothers, a fact they have used in their work, reproducing their image in sculptural figures and thereby provoking reflection on identity.
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DAVID G. TORRES
Why have you called your exhibition Limbo?
We were interested in what Manuel Delgado used to say about boundaries and about people not being on the edge but rather living on the edge, people who are in transit towards something and therefore in perpetual definition. We then looked up "Limbo" in the dictionary and, among its definitions, we were interested in the part where "being in limbo" corresponds with "being distracted and fascinated or awaiting an event without being able to finish something".
This is the theme you have always dealt with: figures with subjects that have a diffuse identity or none at all.
Yes, we've always talked about the same thing. |
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Does this emphasis on identity have anything to do with the fact that you are twins? In fact, I never know which one of you I'm talking to.
This is also interesting because it forms part of our work: we're MP & MP Rosado.
And the only way of doing this interview is to treat you as if you were one person.
Being twins allows us to talk about identity. But we are interested in dealing with the theme more widely, as if we were all a reflection of someone. In both this piece and the previous one, which we did for the Pontevedra Biennial, we have tried to put the spectator, to some extent, in our shoes.
You're playing with the fact of being twins?
Yes, we're playing with that and of course it's something we're interested in. We've read a lot about the subject because, like everyone, we've got lots of things to resolve, each for himself and before others.
Although it is also true that there are brothers who are closer and more intimate than we are, as, in fact, we're not like that at all.
Being twins is normally seen as a difficult thing. Despite this, you've turned the conflict into a virtue: the virtue of living in conflict.
Of course, all those people who Manuel Delgado talks about, who could be mad or in love, living on the edge; all those on the precipice, facing the abyss, form the linking thread we were interested in highlighting.
The figures you have used until now are kind of self-portraits. You have a considerable presence in your work. If there was only one of you, I would say it was ego worship.
Until now we have been very visible and we have made ourselves very visible in the sculptures of ourselves, and, what's more, in a very ostentatious, baroque way. Egotism is something everyone discharges in oneself, but, of course...
… there are two of you. How do you work as a pair, in a group?
The idea is, for example, that one draws and the other rubs out. While one does the other undoes. He destroys many things I suggest and I destroy others. And the mixture of everything is what means we end up with something.
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So your meeting point is the clash.
Yes, we have a lot of conflicts.
Do you identify your work as group work or do you identify yourselves with other groups of artists, like the Gelatins or the Dinos brothers and Jake Chapman?
No. We can always find a certain affinity with other artists who are also twins or brothers. Although we like to have the idea of being a team, we see ourselves as a single artist.
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In some groups of artists you can detect the meeting of the “internal committee” to decide what to do.
That's not the case with us.
You said you were ostentatious and baroque: To what point does your work, with these recognisable figures, owe something to the tradition of Sevillian imagery?
Whether or not you are conscious of it, the references are there. The Seville Fine Arts Faculty also owes a lot to that tradition. Almost all the sculptors who come out of it study imagery. We studied there and we did a course on imagery.
However, in our work this has been something that has come out afterwards. To start with, we took black-and-white photos of ourselves. From 2001 onwards we began to make sculptural figures of ourselves. The early ones were of clay, so we had this tradition very much in mind. |
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There's also a series of modern artists who use realist and naturalist figures, from Jake & Dinos Chapman and Ron Mueck to Maurizio Cattelan…
Yes. Or Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, whose latest figures are made of wax.
But in Limbo these figures are not seen.
For what we wanted to say, figures have served us well, but we have reached a kind of limit. That's why we're in a hiding process. Here, we are showing absence instead. They are in the exhibition even though they can't be seen.
To start with in this project we thought about making it so that, through cracks in the wall, you could see someone else, in turn, looking out through a wall. But it seemed very obvious. Now they are hidden and the feeling is stranger. The fact that the figures are inside the wall, covered by false tiles, is much more to do with limbo, with a place of transit.
In making the figures disappear, the universal value given by the fact of being twins should change. Can you carry on talking about limits and identity without the need for these figures?
We've always wanted to reconcile some kinds of emotion. When you see a film or read a book you like, you always think: I'd like to do that with something physical that provokes the same emotion. It's difficult, but it's our challenge. In this sense, after almost five years working with figures, now their absence – or near absence because we see pieces of them – also seemed interesting to us, because the hidden figures take the possibility of being nobody to the extreme.
In this project, and in your work in general, you place great importance on theatrical design and theatricality.
This again is related to identity because it speaks of the real and the fictional, that is what is represented, what is fiction and what is real. We play with all this. That's why the piece can be seen from behind from above, clearly showing what is false.
And why don't you hide the mechanics?
For us, the most important thing is the part the spectators see coming into Santa Mònica, when they find our wall and don't see the whole piece – the back – but rather have to discover what there is to see through the cracks in the wall. But, from above, the sleight of hand is clear and it says different things.
“The trick and the cardboard” can be seen.
It's the first time we have done it clearly and perhaps that has something to do with the size of the project. It’s not only the first time we have exhibited in Barcelona, it’s the first time we have done a project at an art centre. We are working on another project for the Andalusian Centre for Contemporary Art and also for BF15 in Lyon alongside the biennial there, but this is the first one of this size.
So, this is your first exhibition in Barcelona?
It's the first individual one; we did something small a couple of years ago. We haven't exhibited much in Madrid either.
Really?
We didn't want to do things we weren't interested in.
How do you see the art scene? And not just the Spanish scene, because I don't even know whether that exists.
In the first place, we are concerned about the dimension a foreign artist can have here and the dimension the artist does not have outside.
As for creation, I believe we are up to date enough with what's going on, because we like it and it interests us. The truth is that it is difficult to find a project that excites you; everything seems quite predictable, not causing any great stir.
Above all, however, you have the conflict with your own work – you're never satisfied with it. It's like the song by Astrud: “Everything seems like shit to me.”
In any case, good self-criticism is important for staying up to date.
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| MP & MP Rosado, Limbo, 2004 |
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