Dans Buñuel, en guerra, performance-conférence inédite fruit de longues recherches, Paco Cao passe en revue la vie de Luis Buñuel, s’attardant sur son passage éclair au MoMA (New York), et les repérages qu’il aurait entrepris à Bruxelles pour El Ángel.

Luis Buñuel a sans aucun doute été employé par le MOMA comme conseiller et rédacteur en chef auprès du "Bureau de coordination d'Affaires inter-américaines". Il a également fait de nombreux repérages à Bruxelles pour son film El Ángel Exterminador. Et pour couronner le tout, Buñuel a fourni la recette du Martini Dry que vous vous devez d'essayer. En partant d'une analyse minutieuse de documents d'archives, Paco Cao nous propose un voyage au coeur de la vie et l'oeuvre de Luis Buñuel. Il sera accompagné de Pablo Gómez Sala et de Rachel Babruskinas pour présenter une performance-conférence inédite loin de toute rigueur historique, créée spécialement pour l'exposition El Ángel Exterminador au Palais des Beaux- arts.

WHO'S PACO CAO ?!
Central to Paco Cao’s work is his interest in art action. Primarily concerned with creating a relationship with the spectator, the core mission of all his works, most of Paco Cao’s actions are driven by communication and surprise and based on the use of mass media. His documentation of processes of bureaucratic red tape and the construction of identity also play a major role in his work. Between his early poster announcing Paco Cao ha muerto (Paco Cao is dead) in 1989, and his latest forages into dance which have led to a featurelength film, he moved to New York, where he developed a seminal project he had begun in Spain, in which he literally hires out his body Rent a Body (1993-1996), or Border (1995-ongoing), where he expands the limits and meaning of the body as an artwork. One of Cao’s most significant interventions is related with the work on display in this exhibition. After an exhaustive study of some artworks, Cao decided to
look for people physically resembling the characters in a number of famous paintings. He wanted the people responding to his actions to shed their cloak of anonymity and to become something artistic. To achieve this end, he announced a competition and, with the support of an advertising campaign and media attention from newspapers and magazines, he created a parody of our society. While what the art world values most is the consideration of the artwork as something material and apolitical, Paco Cao’s work ironically inverts those premises with the aid of documentation which, in his case, is essential in carrying out long-term projects bringing to the fore the constitution of the self in a culture constantly exposed to the spectacle.