Zush

MACBA, Barcelona
Through March 4

The title of this retrospective exhibition dedicated to Albert Porta, in art Zush, is a play on the words “te cura” (“it heals you”). For Zush, artistic creation is a territory of freedom related to the search for harmony and personal balance. “I do what I do because of pleasure, to heal me and be happy,” says the artist. His work is based on the construction of a personal mythology, made up of an accumulation of images—human figures, eyes, brains, sex—that, used repetitively, become symbolic.

Porta’s work changed significantly in 1968, during a stay in a mental hospital, when a schizophrenic patient named him Zush. Since that time, he has been developing an artistic universe, the Evrugo Mental State, which is sort of political state inexorably linked to the artist’s mental state. Evrugo is a sexually and spiritually liberated utopia, complete with governmental policy, passport, anthem, flag, diplomats, ministers, and its own language. As Zush declares, “Evrugo is a liberating state, an act of constant self-affirmation and an answer to any manifestation of power.”

Not only is the conceptualization of this universe relevant, but its aesthetic formulation as well. The artist uses a great variety of media including painting, sculpture, sound, books (which he considers “portable studios” for recording images and ideas), and digital media—a field he entered through collaborating on the Peter Gabriel CD-ROM Xplora, a formative experience for his own CD-ROM PsicoManualDigital (1998). For Internet, Zush has developed www.evru.org, a site in continual evolution.

In addition to the various elements relating to Evrugo, the exhibition is enhanced by the presentation of the Tecura computer program, which invites visitors to interact and experiment with Zush’s universe—even creating new inhabitants for Evrugo. Yet more interesting are the three rooms designed by architect Enric Ruiz-Geli in which the artist lived and worked for the duration of the exhibition. The installation transforms the museum into a living space in which the artist presents himself to visitors as someone absolutely approachable, rendering the exhibition a permanent work-in-progress.




Montse Badia