If I say to you 'Don't think about the exhibition of Ignasi Aballí at the Fundació Miro'..., if you've already been to it, you'll think about it. And what about if you haven't? That's my dilemma. If I outline a series of pieces from the show and, as is habitual in conceptual art, explain to you what they're about, you'll create an image of something that has nothing to do with what you'll actually find. It's not the same to read a review about the religious painting of the 'Divine' Morales at the MNAC, than to read one about the exhibition of Ignasi Aballí at the Fundació Miró. Morales painted and Aballí metatheorises about the act of painting, of the act of looking and of the passing of time... which is another form of painting. Aballí's exhibition is a Möbius strip about the art of Aballí, which in its turn is another Möbius strip about the tradition of painting and perception understood in its widest definition. All of which contributes to the scarcely innocent title of 'Infinite sequence'. It's sequence as a progression, as a living algorithm, that refutes any notion of progress or even of horizon.
Having said all that, visiting the Aballí exhibition at the Fundació Miró means engaging the thinking machine. We're not faced by a cryptic creative; his work has various levels of interpretation and a physical presence that is agreeably neutral, hardly aggressive but not innocuous either. Perhaps too cerebral, but that's down to taste.
'Panta rhei,' said Heraclitus. Everything flows. Nobody bathes twice in the same waters, and there's no constant of Aballí – time, colour, perception, descriptive act, representation – that remains immutable. Of the 35 pieces on show, around 15 were specifically produced for the occasion. The rest, engrained with a perverse tautological mechanism, bings its own modest, invisible but essential, grain of sand.