Artistas
Alexej Meschtschanow
Examines the physical and aesthetic qualities of established social conventions through sculpture and installation. Studying our inmediate social environments with an analytic and compassionate eye, he assembles found objects, derelic furniture and archival photography.
His work focuses on the imaginative potential and psycologycal depths involved in the construction of identities, compulsion toward self realization and the socially driven urge for optimization. His sculptural works interlock two communicative modes, the passive and the active. The end effect of his creative output culminates in figures of poetic melancholy, attempting to break out of the vicious cycles of fordist, totalitarian or fetishist forms of functionalism.
Angela Cuadra
Ángela Cuadra investigates images that deal with concealment techniques used throughout recent history, in an extensive phenomenological study of invisibility. By examining the tensions between the natural and the artificial, the public and the private, the whole and the parts, the essential and the superfluous, the artist uses a material with pre-existing historical and semantic charges to reconvert and resignify it.
Based on collage and approached from the intuition, her works induce compositions in which the found material is barely elaborated with prominence to the forms themselves through their juxtaposition with other materials.
The special focus on the dialogue between fragments, on the emotion that arises when finding chords of color, shape or texture, resembles the perception of her work to that of a musical composition. To make language without literature, to make music without melody, to make paintings without paint. To build from the base of what is given, of what is in the margins.
Ângela Ferreira
Ângela Ferreira, was born in Maputo, Mozambique, grew up in South Africa and earned her Master of Fine Arts from the Michaelis School of Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town.
Ferreira’s work is concerned with the continuing impact of colonialism and postcolonialism in contemporary society, an investigation that she carries out in depth with the materialization of ideas in a concise and resonant formalization.
She represented Portugal at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 with a continuation of her research on the mechanisms through which European modernism has tried to adapt, failing on numerous occasions, to the realities of the African continent, with a project that was conceived stemming from the story of the “Maison Tropicale” by Jean Prouvé.
The architecture also serves as a starting point to delve into her long investigation of the erasure of colonial memory and the rejection of repair. On the other hand, her sculptural, sound and video tributes make constant reference to the economic, political and cultural history of the African continent, while recovering the work and the image of unexpected figures such as Peter Blum, Carlos Cardoso, Ingrid Jonker, Jimi Hendrix, Jorge Ben Jor, Jorge dos Santos, Diego Rivera or Miriam Makeba.
Arnulf Rainer
His committed search for new approaches of painting and his constant development of painterly strategies, accompanied by performative works and extensive writing, has led Arnulf Rainer to become one of the most influential living artists.
In the 70’s he starts to take photographs of himself. Creating a link between the theatrical and the graphic as a media of expression he gets closer to Viennese Actionism and exploring body language through performance he expands his practice to video, and starts using the hands to extend the painting.
Interested in the automatism he based his expressivity in the act of hiding existing images getting closer to abstraction, and to the total concealment of forms. Always emphasizing the human act of painting and the body language that painting involves, Rainer praises the first forms of human expression, and even the format of some canvases exceeds the conventional limits.
Chiharu Shiota
Heir of Ana Mendieta and a whole generation of feminist artists form the early 70’s, Shiota works with her body as an intervention space, realizing performances that deal with our link with the earth, the past and the memory.
Well known for her installations with thread as main material, her symmetric tangles captivate the spectator at first sight, creating feelings that go between safety and fear, fascination and ugliness, while awakening memories, and both absence and existence as philosophical matters.
The presence and absence of her body is the thread running through her work, and ultimately is what makes it possible to understand her confrontation with the question of defining the artwork, the artistic subject and the public, the interior and exterior space.
In Shiota’s philosophy the true artwork is created only when the expectations for familiar artistic forms of expression are abandoned in favor of a perception of things that get by without any attributions of meaning.
Clara Sánchez Sala
“Writing is trying to know what we would write if we wrote”
Marguerite Duras, Écrire, Gallimard, 1993
As an echo of the artistic practice of Clara Sánchez Sala, this quote by Marguerite Duras accompanies her entire production to date. If for Duras writing is an intention, for Sánchez, the act of creating is an attempt that takes place in the impossible meeting of past and present.
The artist constantly remembers and measures her favorite trips, the time that elapses between autobiographical events and history. From this poetics of intimacy, she not only recreates her personal history, but also plays with temporal imbalances to awaken a feeling of estrangement from her personal environment.
Clara’s works are indications that point to the heuristic effect of distance. The artist thus places the viewer in the archaeologist’s situation, seeing the pieces as riddles that she cannot directly identify. Sánchez regularly uses this distancing process to question what is seen and what is known, and thus underline the idea of impermanence and incompleteness.
Danica Phelps
The work of Danica Phelps gathers conceptual precedents not only by taking in account economy as a main theme of her work but also in the own practice of the data capture, the exhaustiveness, and in the record of the facts, that have been a main feature of conceptual art.
Since 1996 Danica Phelps has been documenting all of her income and expenses through drawings in a system that becomes increasingly layered and complex. In this system, each drawing is a depiction of a daily activity and documentation of a financial transaction, and each dollar is represented by a single stripe of watercolor: green for income, red for expense and grey for credit.
The result is a huge personal diary, even if speaking of results is hard. First because the work is always in process, and second because the work in itself is almost not a work in itself but a tracing, a document of pieces of everyday life.
Daniela Libertad
The works by Daniela Libertad in drawing, photography and video, explore the several relations among geometric forms, objects and her own body, the perceptions on what is intangible, mystical and their connections with everyday life.
The artist investigates also on how sculptural dynamics are constructed and deposited into objects, in an effort to understand the relations of weight, tension and balance among materials, shapes and objects.
Her body of work pushes into tension the perceptions of what is both intangible and habitual. By using different media, the artist allows her work to confront immaterial elements and geometrical forms with common objects and her own body, exploring both the mystical and ethereal features of these components, and concrete aspects such as weight, density and touch. In these tension exercises, the artist unsettles the mixture between apparently opposite fields, between physical and mental or abstract and figurative, towards a stage of precarious balance between parts that, ultimately, inform us on a fragile and banal condition of our apprehension of day-to-day poetry.
Fritzia Irizar
Fritzia Irizar’s conceptual artworks test the elusive forces of value as it is expressed in economic and symbolic forms including labor, precious materials, money, and myths.
Her work refers to the flow of money on an individual scale and to the consumption of the work of art.
Several of her projects have incorporated diamonds and salt–both crystals and similar in appearance, both used as currency in different historical moments.Salt is prized for its food preserving properties. By contrast, diamonds have been valued only for the purity of their appearance. The notions of these materials' value are subject to the beliefs and fantasies, a complexity alluded to in her pieces.
Fritzia Irizar works recognizes that history and science are almost fictions, built on small surfaces of knowledge and are subject to the decision of a few individuals. However, they are fictions that we want to hold: as acts of faith, of belonging, of will or certainty
Taken out of its typical environments, the currency Irizar uses in her works takes on symbolic qualities that speak to the construction of desire and value.
Jordi Alcaraz
Alcaraz's discourse stems from the classical tradition of painting and sculpture, arriving to a reflection on volume, language and time through the use of materials, such as water, glass, mirrors, reflections, or books that include this idea.
In his artistic language the visual transgression predominates, a playful dynamic among many different gazes and the combination of transparencies and holes that allow a glimpse of hidden, magical spaces. Thus Jordi Alcaraz establishes, through his works, an unprecedented, surprising and metaphorical relationship with the world.
Sculptures, paintings and drawings, always through his peculiar treatment of materials, and his poetic word games and unexpected titles. Sets of pigment bags that sink into glass surfaces, poetically showing the beginning of the painting, wooden sculptures that pierce the acrylic urn in which they are in, passing from the darkness of the night to the light of day, colors that flee from their cans through imaginary holes, impossible portraits.
Due to his obsession with the craft of art, in his works he delves into the almost obsessive exploration of the artist's work: drawing, sculpting, painting ..., focusing rather in the exercise of doing, than in the works as the completion of an action. As a result, absence seems to be more relevant than evidence in the works. The absence of almost everything, and the utmost importance to the disappearance of the work, with the permanence of the action. What matters is the sensation of drawing, what is there at the precise moment before doing it, the impression at the end, but not the work itself, not the resulting drawing. There is no image or reference to any idea, the artist draws but there is no drawing left. We can see the space that has been left, the trace of the material used, but the absence of anything else is almost absolute.
Jordi Alcaraz breaks the material in different ways, everything is less evocative and more poignant. Layers of materials are superimposed as protective shields, and they build diverse and more complex layers of meaning.
His works can be found in collections such as Biedermann Museum, Donaueschingen (Germany), Colección Fontanal Cisneros, Miami; Williams Collection, Massachusetts; Olor Visual, Barcelona; or Fundación Banco Sabadell.
TEXTS Y CATALOGUES:
Jordi Teixidor
Considered as one of the most important representatives of the Spanish Abstraction, Jordi Teixidor identifies himself with the modern tradition and critical thought, translating to his work a doubtful and critical spirit, developing abstraction and a work that is rational, genuinely Apollonian, superbly balanced, strictly contained with regard to expressive elements.
The modernity of Jordi Teixidor is reflexive and his paintings don’t look for satisfaction, but require the spectator to think, denying a narrative reading.
Through his use of black, Teixidor has formalized a solemn sequence of images that make up one of the most outstanding tragic expressions in contemporary Spanish painting.
José Luis Landet
José Luis Landet’s work involves a wide range of operating and assimilating cultural processes crossed by social, political and ideological actions, through which he explores cultural remnants. The restoration and presentation of other artists works, mostly amateur painters, represents an ideal starting point for Landet’s objectives: to recover, document and innovate.
Landet believes classification is the most accurate way to know every tiny detail of an unfamiliar painting. The Argentinian artist deconstructs images, and in the process, reveals new narratives. Landet deconstruct images and in the process review new narratives.
TEXTS AND CATALOGUES:
Carlos Gómez. Presenta José Luis Landet, 2014 (ES EN)
EL FIN DE GÓMEZ ES ETERNO, 2019 (ES)
The Affirmation of Utopia, 2017 (EN)
ERRATAS (1983) de Carlos Gómez a Zé Braulio. Presenta José Luis Landet (PT ES)
Dibujo Actual en México, UNAM, 2020 (ES)
Laura F. Gibellini
Laura F. Gibellini’s artistic practice is procedural and diagrammatic in nature and is fundamentally formalized through drawing, site-specific installations, video, the creation of objects or writing. The consideration of the expanded drawing, as well as the abandonment of the frontal, bounded and two-dimensional representation of the traditional drawing in favor of immersive projects and of an “environmental” nature are at the base of her work.
This begins by considering the notion of place and wondering how we relate to the world, to go on to inquire about what type of conventions we use to represent it and for what purpose - which takes it from the intimacy of the domestic sphere to the territory and the environment. -.
Her most recent work investigates those elements that are at the limits of the visible, at the limits of the representable and therefore at the limits of what can be thought. In particular, it focuses on what is permanently lacking and yet is basic to life (such as air, water, light, or the meteorological or atmospheric conditions of certain places) and considers how the difficulties of representation affect our understanding. of the world, since what remains unrepresentable cannot be recognized, and therefore thought. Gibellini’s work explores the gaps in representation and the possibilities of thinking the unthinkable.
Mauro Giaconi
The work of Mauro Giaconi explores the possibilities of drawing as an expanded field, through which the artist reaches over other disciplines, such as sculpture and installation, in a way to investigate the architecture, the precariousness and the body as territories in conflict.
In this sense, the artist subverts both the role of paper as a medium, as well as the idea of drawing as the basal expression of general artistic practice. This leads towards the occupation of space, the performative gesture that emphases the corporal experience, and the intervention of objects and universal references belonging to the contemporary metanarrative.
Within the conceptual field, his works usually present contents and experiences that either clash or dissolve contrasts, such as birth and death, construction and demolition, freedom and imprisonment, in a thought-provoking gesture that revisits and questions the dichotomous signification of ideas.
Moris
Moris work revolves around themes that address representation, social and subjective agency, urban issues and marginal cultures often taken for granted in mainstream society. Informed by constant field work, the issues Moris’ researches have been an intrinsic part of his daily life since childhood, and pertinent to both his personal and professional formation.
The street and social space in general are his laboratory for investigating issues, gathering data, analyzing visual cultures, and vernacular aesthetics. Observing, integrating, and learning the diverse social codes of the urban underclass and underworld; their spoken dialects and semiotics; their strategies for survival; and informal use of aesthetics in their environments in order to make daily life more humane and dignified are the driving ethos for Moris’ work.
Pipo Hernández Rivero
Pipo Hernandez Rivero’s work poses questions about 'universally accepted cultural truths'. Built with images and ideas very much anchored in the memories of modern culture, his works move in the territory of suspicion and opacity.
Pointing at the complexity of the possibilities of painting in the 21st century, his works offer a reconsideration of the pictorial from both formal and conceptual structures, ideas of failure and references to the cultural avant-gardes are always underlying the works.
Mixing painting with cheap and not lasting materials and involving text in largely unknown languages, and therefore received as elements of anxiety, the pieces confront the spectator with an unresolved dialogue forcing the viewer to rethink identity and value.
This lack of understanding creates a certain anxiety in the spectator, as well as a gap of meaning that obliges us to look at the work in a deeper way.
Rafael Grassi
In his works, Rafael Grassi reconciles the attachment for the pictorial matter and the intention to create an illusion of perspective, a deceitful figurative image. Figures are the starting point taht gradually dissolves , getting free from pre- conceived meanings, and generating a pictorial surface full of paradoxes and chromatique diversity.
Formal analogies and linguistic pollutions are some of the ideas drafted in his work, some of the strategies used by the artist to prove the nature, possibilities and boundaries of the physic and conceptual materials he uses. Drawing, photography and painting are mixed in a creative process in which the working methodologies of each of them are exchanged in a game of roles and breaking ups. The elements conquer now an autonomy free of any concrete meaning.
Tamara Arroyo
In the artist’s body of work there is an insistence on the habitability of spaces, which results in questioning the ‘domestication’ of the modern inhabitant, the consumption of certain formalizations and objects in the interiors of current homes, as well as in an autobiographical reference that articulates a discourse on individual and collective memory.
In this recurrence to the image of places and their appropriation through art, the city, as a public space, appears as a privileged scenario of everyday life, with its identity marks and creative potential.
Through different formalizations, her works talk about how our environment and its architecture influence us, distinguishing between the lived, experiential or existential space that operates unconsciously, and the physical and geometric space.
The artist also emphasizes different intellectual states that occur when we establish relations to our immediate environment, how the basic emotional need to belong to a place, the importance of peripheral vision that integrates us into space, and ultimately makes us see details and situations that sometimes go unnoticed, pushing the public from being mere spectators to being stimulated towards other muscular and tactile sensations.
INTERVIEWS:
Desatados - 114 Tamara Arroyo, RTVE
Caniche Editorial - Hablar normal y corriente (Tamara Arroyo)
