EL HOMBRE QUE SABÍA DEMASIADO - José Fiol — Galería Reus | Contemporary Art Galleries in Palma, Mallorca

Galería Reus is a contemporary art gallery based in Mallorca whose trajectory dates back to 2003. Over the years, the project has evolved through different forms of collaboration and programming, consolidating itself as a space dedicated to the research, production, and dissemination of contemporary art.

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EL HOMBRE QUE SABÍA DEMASIADO - JOSÉ FIOL

Curated by Raquel Victoria

Dates

19/09/26 - 01/12/26

Nit de l’Art 2026

Text

José Fiol (Palma, 1978) has built a practice closely linked to the image, the archive, and the mechanisms through which we construct and reconstruct memory. His training at the Centre d'Estudis Fotogràfics is fundamental to understanding a process that rarely begins before the canvas. Fiol searches, selects, photographs, cuts out, and connects images from cinema, the press, history, or his own archive to later transfer them to painting. Rather than reproducing them, he displaces them from their original context to activate new associations and narratives.

The Man Who Knew Too Much brings this procedure into the exhibition space and makes visible what usually remains inside the studio. The room is built around two heavyweights: a ten-meter wall that brings together works from different moments in Fiol's career, new paintings, Polaroid photographs, original posters, documents, and found images; and a table tennis table designed and produced specifically for the exhibition, conceived simultaneously as a sculpture, a functional object, and a stage for a series of matches that will activate the show.

The project is part research and part semi-retrospective. Through a historical figure, Fiol also revisits his own trajectory, bringing together ways of painting, researching, and connecting images that have permeated his practice over recent years. The exhibition thus unfolds in three chapters connected to each other by the same figure: Ivor Montagu. Cinema, ping-pong, and espionage form a network of stories that Fiol uses to look toward the past, but also toward his own work.

I. Ivor Montagu. The Man Who Knew Too Much

Ivor Montagu (1904–1984) seems to have lived several lives simultaneously. Filmmaker, producer, critic, writer, table tennis player, founder of the International Table Tennis Federation, and communist activist, his biography crosses some of the great cultural and political events of the 20th century. He worked with Alfred Hitchcock, accompanied Sergei Eisenstein to Hollywood, and actively participated in the international expansion of table tennis.

It is precisely this unlikely accumulation of connections that interests Fiol. Montagu becomes a sort of hinge character, a point from which one story inevitably leads to another. His relationship with cinema opens the first chapter of the exhibition: his collaboration with Hitchcock and, particularly, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), for which he was associate producer and co-writer. Fiol connects that film with the remake made by Hitchcock in 1956 and converts its stills, details, and characters into new pictorial material.

II. The Table. Ping-Pong and Diplomacy

Montagu's second life seems to belong to someone else. He was a table tennis champion, represented Great Britain internationally, and in 1926 founded the International Table Tennis Federation, which he chaired for more than forty years.

Fiol follows this thread until reaching a later episode that would transform a seemingly minor sport into a political instrument: the so-called ping-pong diplomacy, linked to the rapprochement between China and the United States. In the exhibition, this story leaves the image behind to physically occupy the room. A table created specifically for the project becomes a artwork and, at the same time, maintains its original function. People play on it. The match becomes a performance, and the artistic object becomes once again what it represents: a ping-pong table.

III. The Man Who Never Was

The third connection leads from Ivor to his brother Ewen Montagu, a British naval intelligence officer during World War II and one of the central figures of Operation Mincemeat. The operation consisted of feeding false documentation to German forces using a corpse dressed as a British officer, with the objective of making them believe the Allies planned to invade Greece instead of Sicily.

Here appears one of those historical crossovers that seem built for a movie. In 1956, The Man Who Never Was was released, based on Ewen Montagu's operation. That same year, Hitchcock released his new version of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Two brothers, two stories linked directly or indirectly to espionage, and two films whose titles seem to respond to each other: the man who knew too much and the man who never was.

However, The Man Who Knew Too Much is not, ultimately, an exhibition about Ivor Montagu. Or not exclusively. Montagu functions as a gateway to a way of working that was already present in José Fiol's practice: searching for an image, discovering another story behind it, and continuing to pull the thread.

That is why the large wall of the exhibition mixes Montagu's archive with Fiol's archive, and historical research with works belonging to different moments of his career. The exhibition brings together different ways of painting that the artist has developed over recent years and shows materials and processes that usually remained in the studio. Fiol understands this project as a point of transition, with something of an ending and something of a beginning.

Raquel Victoria

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