The driving force in Pep Agut's work as a whole is his research into the conditions that make artistic practice possible. Sometimes he uses objects associated with traditional art such as canvases, stretchers and display cases; at other times he focuses on intangible elements such as the very notion of representation, or even the figure of the artist. L'artificialité du néant follows the latter direction. While on other occasions Agut explored the figure of the mime or Chinese shadows, here he appears as a magician. In a purely theatrical action, Agut incorporates clothing and gestures that are universally familiar. Under the conjurer's costume hides the artist, a mime who rather than entertain or frivolously distract the viewer, wants to trigger a reflection on those who, like a magician, can create something from nothing. ‘(...) It is less the sociological traits of the artist's function that interests Agut – understood by the amateur and even experienced public – in terms of the myth of the creator who, blessed by the gods, makes something out of nothing, than the status of the nothing itself. The sort of reflection in which Pep Agut invites us to engage is bound up more with the status of the visible and the image (...) The magician himself stands in for the act of apparition, the moment where one brings something into being where previously had been nothing: exhibition being the art of making the invisible appear.’ To conjure something up is to place oneself in the realm of fiction; it is what the artist does, as does the magician, whose manipulations and seemingly true effects matter more than the objects or truth itself. But the magician and the artist also deal with the notion of disappearance. They operate, in this sense, within the artificiality of nothingness. ‘True magic is the art of showing and getting people to look at what does not exist.’ (LAGEIRA, Jacinto: ‘Magician’, in AAVV: Pep Agut. Als actors secundaris. Barcelona: MACBA/ACTAR, 2000 [exh. cat.])