Love & F/X is a peculiar work of fiction that lies somewhere between the music video and the  80s TV series. The piece is built on lucid citations of visual products specifically created for teenagers and their problems.

A group of attractive adolescents get together in a gym. Very soon, attempts at communication amongst the characters take place, but it seems as though the sign code that they use is inadequate for getting in contact. A strange asepsis prevails, a certain immobilism, a charming incapacity for expressing one’s feelings. Unexpectedly bizarre surreal phenomena, such as a suggestive pink smoke, take hold of the gym, managing to effect the longed for communication and transformation.

The piece, sweetened with hyperrealist colours and touches of magical unreality, has an ambiguous tone. It pays tribute to youth culture and its potential to generate its own universes of resistance to the norm, but at the same time it criticizes the way in which society ends up appropriating and denaturalizing these aesthetic features.

Carles Congost’s work suggests a framework for thinking about creative mechanisms, about the reception of the work of art and about the negotiations between high and low cultures.

Congost’s aesthetic referents stem from the pop universe, from popular music and mass aesthetics, from the music video and B movies, as well as TV culture. He also makes frequent ironic references to the system of artistic production and compares it with other creative spheres, like the music industry. Actually, it was his interest in music that led him to co-found the music group The Congosound.

Carles Congost is one of the top Spanish artists in terms of international presence. His work in its entirety deals with the issue of identity within contemporary societies.
 

Love & F/X is one of his most representative videos, as it was part, together with other photographic and sculptural work of his, of the exhibition Popcorn Love in the Espacio Uno space of the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, in 2001.