Vitrines CMYK, 2011

As the title indicates, Aballí takes what usually serves as a support for a work of art – Perspex display cases placed on plinths – and alters their function: while they usually serve as a support, here they constitute the content. While they normally ‘show’, in this case they ‘demonstrate’. Aballí presents four apparently empty showcases. Instead of objects, he assigns them a colour: the four primary pigments for the execution of any type of colour printing. While elsewhere he has worked on chromatism based on painting, in this case he refers to the standard four-colour printing system known by its acronym: CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, key [or black]). But the showcases also incorporate another of the artist’s common elements: language. Each has a brief description of the assigned colour, with information about the colour in question and a list of its different ordering systems used from Aristotle to date.

Besides offering a theory about colour that reverberates throughout the artist's work, Vitrines CMYK can also be seen as a reflection on the conditions of the exhibition space, on what is shown and what is said, on transparency and opacity, invisibility and illegibility, and on what is exhibited and the conditions that make the act of exhibiting possible. Because, beyond its visual properties, Aballí's work reflects on the limits of the illusion of representation, whether pictorial or linguistic.