hotel nada

Nada hotel revisited

Works by Yamandú Canosa from the 90s.

Paintings and drawings

During the 90s, Yamandú Canosa began working on the Hotel Nada project (1991-1993), which he developed in different exhibitions at the Benet Costa Gallery and the Ciento Gallery in Barcelona, at the Reus Reading Center and at the Gallery Rian Van Rijsbergen from Rotterdam. The entire project was exhibited at CASM in Barcelona and at the La Regenta and La Granja art centers in the Canary Islands.

Hotel Nada is the antecedent of the operations in the “language landscape” that were the center of the retrospective exhibition The Tree of Different Fruits of 2011 at the Fundació Suñol in Barcelona. Yamandú Canosa reviews that period in a recent interview *: ... “The word Nothing referred to what was not named, to what was outside the landscape of language or at its limit. I imagined myself as a fifth columnist of language, boycotting the possibility of meaning. "..." In a way, the Hotel Nada program was the formal reverse of the minimalist project, but with the same utopia of canceling meaning. Of course I failed in the attempt, but it was an exciting experience, which left me the trail of dozens of works and the possibility of abounding in the opening of resources

formal and conceptual. ”...”

The genesis of the Hotel Nada project was suggested to me by reading Edie, the wonderful biography of Edie Sedgwick, muse of Andy Warhol. The book describes

the atmosphere of the Chelsea Hotel in New York in the mid-1960s, where dozens of

characters lived on the edge of experience, on the edge, on which they walked as

clumsy tightrope walkers. The titles of the works of the Hotel Nada project were room numbers. ”

* Interview by Christian Alonso for the Departament d'Història de l'Art i Estètica of the Universitat de Barcelona, on the occasion of the Matèria Primera group exhibition, at the Center d'art Contemporani in Barcelona (November 2017 / April 2018) .