Curatorial text

(Dialogues) Art, Music and Heritage is a summer program that brings together three fundamental pillars of culture—art, music, and heritage—within the emblematic Canonica of Santa Maria de Vilabertran. For the past eleven years, it has also hosted a contemporary art exhibition co-produced by Bòlit, Centre d’Art Contemporani Girona, and the Catalan Agency for Cultural Heritage.

Appealing to that transformative encounter in which experience, observation, prediction, and imagination converge, this exhibition brings together two artists who work with these elements from singular perspectives. Both begin from observation and thought, yet materialize these concepts through profoundly different approaches and with surprisingly diverse results.

Each artist formalizes the creative process within a cube: one invites us to immerse ourselves in it, to witness a space where lines of thought, exploration, and ideation converge into a new reality; the other keeps us at a distance, asking us to trust the artist’s word that, within the invisibility of the cube, a network of moving photons weaves its presence.

At the heart of this dialogue, light emerges as both matter and metaphor. Echoing the speculations of ancient Greek thinkers, light was conceived as an emanation of the observer: according to the emission theory of Pythagoras, Plato, and Euclid, the eyes projected rays that touched objects, while Democritus and Aristotle argued instead that objects emitted particles or images toward our eyes, according to the theory of reception.

This human quest to explain the world and our perception of it is universal and cannot be resolved by science alone. Art always intervenes as a space for experimentation and questioning.

The installations presented play with the boundaries between the known and the unknown, the visible and the invisible, and appeal to the suggestive power of intuition, at the crossroads where new ideas germinate. It is in this precise moment, where experience, observation, questioning, and response converge, that the key instant emerges: the EUREKA! moment.

Solar Cube, by Torrent Pagès, is an immersive installation in the form of a human-scale iron cube, conceived so that visitors can enter it both visually and symbolically. Inside, laser beams cross the space and penetrate a transparent methacrylate cube, generating a shifting network with unexpected trajectories. This luminous web evokes the paths of divergent thinking and suggests that ideas, like light, can be reconfigured when observed from new perspectives. The piece appeals to imagination, intuition, and memory as forces that guide knowledge beyond linear logic. In this space of light and iron, doubt becomes a creative tool, and the cube a territory for reconfiguring perception. In the words of Herbert Simon, it is a heuristic approach: a path of inquiry through trials, errors, and intuitions until a revealing form emerges. Its Eureka! is visible, magical, and shared.

Torrent Pagès (Cassà de la Selva, 1969) is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose career is marked by research at the intersection of art, nature, and technology. His work is articulated through light, water, and translucency, creating immersive and evocative spaces that invite contemplation and symbolic reflection. The use of noble and transparent materials, in which light becomes the vehicle of an essential message, allows him to unfold his most poetic dimension and to build bridges between reality, the subtle world, and the mysteries of life. He holds a degree in Fine Arts and has received grants such as those from the Amigó-Cuyàs Foundation, the Erasmus program at Winchester School of Art, the 4th Spring Grant of L’Escala, and Girona Kreas. He has exhibited in Catalonia, Spain, France, Italy, and England, with highlights including the exhibition Incerta Via at the Casa de Cultura in Girona. He has also collaborated with creators such as filmmaker Bigas Luna and researcher Masaru Emoto, developing work committed to consciousness and social transformation.

Finite Infinite, by Laura Bergillos, is a cubic structure that contains an expanded presence of trapped light. A tiny one-millimeter отверст allows (solar) light to enter; as it passes through, it initiates a silent and incessant loop within a mirror-lined space. Photons bounce, multiply, and reverberate continuously, trapped in a movement that only ceases with darkness. Inside, the cubic centimeters of light persist—imperceptible to the human eye—challenging the notion of time and oscillating between the finite, the infinite, and the eternal. The creative gesture is not shown but intuited. Here, knowledge becomes an act of faith: the artist invites us to believe without seeing, to imagine while fully trusting her creative process. Her Eureka! is intimate, internal, whispered. The work has been scientifically validated by astrophysicist Núria Torres Albà.

Laura Bergillos (Girona, 1992) is a visual artist with a degree in Fine Arts, specializing in sculpture and installation. She has deepened her research into sensory perception through the postgraduate program Sensory Language and the Poetics of Play at the University of Girona, which has strongly shaped the immersive and sensitive nature of her work. She has received several distinctions, including the Special Youth Mention at Inund’Art, selection for the Art PerTot competition, and inclusion in the Exposicions Viatgeres program of the Girona Provincial Council (touring throughout 2025). She has exhibited in venues such as Casal Solleric (Palma), Casa de la Catalanitat (Perpignan), Sala d’Art Jove (Barcelona), and the Casa de Cultura in Girona, among others. Her work is characterized by the creation of intimate, meditative environments using light, fragile, and suggestive materials that engage the senses and invite slow contemplation. Through a subtle and minimalist language, she constructs installations that function as spaces of pause and listening, where the viewer becomes part of the perceptual and symbolic process.

Find the original text in Catalan here.
And the translation in French here.

Credits

Curated by: Sana López Abellán & Nacha Delpiano
Artists: Laura Bergillos & Torrent Pages
Venue: Canònica de Santa Maria de Vilabertran
Dates: 11.07.2025 to 12.09.2025
Partners: Bòlit, Centre d’Art Contemporani Girona, and the Catalan Agency for Cultural Heritage
Photography: Carles Palacios i Berta