Revisits the archetype of an exuberant and paradisiacal land “Pais de la cucaña”, transgressing the popular game of colonial times, known in the South American region as “cucaña” or “palo encebado”. A tall balsa tree trunk, endemic to the subtropical jungles of Ecuador, has been cut down and from it, in the middle of an Amazonian forest, containers containing local fossil fuels are suspended. The image of the light but strong trunk (the lightest of its kind) is a playful vehicle that supports and hangs the “trophies” of modern progress.

The energy paradigm fed the emancipatory dreams of modern societies;  Adrián Balseca’s artistic work opposes the momentum of accumulation and individualism of late capitalism, other ways of being in the world that include solidarity, collectivism, materiality and questioning wealth as a form of power based on the extraction of fossil fuels.

With Phantom Recorder (2018), Adrián Balseca questions the materiality of the world in the age of the Anthropocene. Currently, as the influence of human activity upon the Earth has become a major geological force, capable of irreversibly transforming the planetary ecosystem, Balseca acts and gets involved as an artist to generate a symbology of these challenges on the Ecuadorian territory.

Balseca’s artistic practice is a non-modern one, in the sense of Bruno Latour (1991)1, in which the functional, the utopian, and the poetic are never clearly separated. According to Latour, modern humans have never stopped creating hybrid objects, not only belonging to the technical or scientific worlds, but also participating in the political, cultural or economic ones. As they created these objects, however, modern humans rejected any notion of their hybridness, maintaining instead a world vision that is based on the “Great Division” (Latour 1991) between nature and culture.

In opposition to this modern order, Balseca overcomes its ontological, disciplinary divisions, and challenges the extraterritorial status of art. The point of departure of Phantom Recorder is Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo (1982), which tells the story of Brian Sweeny Fitzgerald in the early 20th century.

This businessman aspires to make a fortune with rubber and, being a lover of music, dreams about building an opera house in the Amazon jungle. What catches Balseca’s attention in this excessive endeavor is the visually dislocated, out-of-place aesthetic of a gramophone on a boat that wanders through the jungle. When he reconstructs the visual aspect of the scene, however, he subverts the “colonial regimen” by modifying the acoustic dimension. In fact, the function of the gramophone in this work is inverted; instead of silencing the forest and its inhabitants by spreading the sound of an aria through the silent jungle, it records the sound of the forest, aware both of the human and the non-human.

By means of this provocative gesture, the artist denounces the bourgeois notion of the autonomy of art, this non-relation that is exemplified by the aria2 performed by Enrico Caruso. Based on this film, on its director and the main character, Balseca exposes the idea of art as a specific historical construct, belonging to a modern, colonial system of divisions. Balseca also removes the main character in his work and reuses the gramophone’s technology to “listen” to “nature”, which demonstrates that every artistic sign is charged with the forces of non-human actants, operating as a translating device for cosmic and material processes.

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra has developed a poetic work, which illustrates stories inspired by memories, the unconscious and by sexuality. From a predominance of the female figure, her work reveals the personality of the artist through a synthetic language based on her mark, typography and austerity. In this exhibition, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, focus her production on the mystical and religious traditions of the Iberian Peninsula influenced by the black legend and the ancestral folk traditions. Moreover, Vásquez de la Horra has started to work with three-dimensional pieces made by paper with drawn surfaces. Besides this atmosphere, animal’s pictures and the rich nature comes from the magic of the artwork that brings us into a dreamy lecture of the work.

LAB 36 presents a new solo show by Oleg Dou (Moscow, 1983)  with a sample that leaves the square format through portraits of characters of hybrid appearance that provide novel ways to the contemporary iconographic tradition. This exhibition is part of the official program of Artnou 2019. 

Oleg Dou takes from the occidental culture his interest in the portrait. Historically, the perseveration of the memory of one person was tightly related to the moral evaluation of the representation. That is,  traditionally only those who were worthy were portrayed. Instead, Oleg Dou’s works develop the presentation of the body as a subversion object through photo capture and digital retouching. In this way, fictional characters with a pale appearance make us question the concepts of beauty, innocence, and perfection bringing us closer to the aesthetics of the strange.

With an extremely neat job, but with a vital aspect, the artist refutes the perception of what defines innocence and youth. In a world went the artificiality and hyperreality occur daily, Oleg Dou makes us feel that the bizarre is part of the intrinsically human. In an interview with The Zoon Magazine, the young photographer said: “I use the artificial nature of digital photography as a tool to reach the point between opposites such as alive and dead, attractive and disturbing, beautiful and ugly. Thus I’m searching to transcribe the feeling of presence that you get while passing a plastic mannequin”.

In his new series “Reborn” Oleg Dou gives one more step and add new composites elements of his language. Parallel to the portraits, Flora, and fauna are added in the photographic theme as well as still lifes of the classical type. Once again, we also face disturbing elements as the insertion of sexual elements in misplaced or unexpected locations. Each photo captures an artificial beauty created through the representation of simple shapes and vegetable elements that are ruined at the same time. Likewise, we find characters with attributes from the animal kingdom that do not refer to the wild condition of the human being or its brutal dimension but transform the characters of the series in a kind of unusual prints that combines the unreal and disturbing with a new way of iconography mythology.

Oleg Dou studied at the Moscow State Institute of Steel and Alloys (2001-2006) had his first individual exhibition in the gallery Le Simoun de Paris went he has 23 years old. In 2007 was awarded the International Photography Awards and the International Color Awards and in 2009 with the Arte Laguna Art Prize, that deserved the attention of the international artistic community. Since then, his work has been included in numerous individual and collective exhibitions in different institutions of Europe and North America, among them, are Atopía in the Centre de Cultura Contemporània of Barcelona (CCCB) in 2010 or the individual in the Multimedia Art Museum of Moscow in 2012.

Galeria Senda will participate in Art Brussels 2019,  in the main session, we will be presenting new pieces by our artists  AES+F, Stephan Balkenhol, José Pedro Croft, Peter Halley, Yago Hortal, Catalina Jaramillo, Ola Kolehmainen, Glenda León, Túlio Pinto, Alexis Rockman, Gino Rubert and Sandra Vásquez de la Horra.

After more than 40 years hidden in his studio, MIRALDA brings out for the first time a group photographs of the famous series Soldats Soldés. This composition, all vintage copies, were taken by Miralda in Paris revealed in black and white between the years 1965 and 1970.

The series commonly know as Soldiers, is probably, the one who helped the most to get know to Miralda in the international scene, the toy soldier, accumulated over collages or inserted in found elements such as furniture, sculptures or public monuments, constitutes the first approximation to the ideas of seriality and files. This series is being widely exhibited on museums and institutions and is part of important collections such as ARTIUM, Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Ministère de la Culture et de la Francophonie, París – Armario, Colección Sylvio Perlstein, Amberes Armoire de Toilette, Colección Musée Cantini, Marsella, Fundación La Caixa, Barcelona, IVAM, Valencia, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid y MACBA Barcelona.

Together with Galeria Senda, Miralda has decided to celebrate the recent award Velázquez de Artes Plásticas 2018 through this individual presentation in Arco hat forms an anti-war plea and documents critical actions with the political situations of that time.

In the main session (booth 9F08) we will be presenting new pieces by our artists  AES+F, Stephan Balkenhol, José Pedro Croft, Peter Halley, Ola Kolehmainen, Miralda, Túlio Pinto, Jaume Plensa, Aitor Ortiz and Glenda León.

 

The exhibition “41° 23′ 20” N 2° 10′ 34’’ E and 41° 25′ 21” N 2° 12′ 32’’ E: Three Times” by Túlio Pinto is the fruit of an intense artistic relationship he established in Barcelona during the four months he spent in the Catalan capital.

The project will be divided into three exhibitions in different galleries and periods of time. His first two exhibitions will be shown between LAB 36 of galeria SENDA and the Piramidón, Centre d’Art Contemporani.

At the Piramidon, where he made an art residence program in the summer of 2018, will be presented a sculptural installation that remits to spatial drawing concept. At the same time, at LAB 36 of galeria SENDA will expose the video Unicórnio which encompasses one of the recurring themes in his investigation, the impermanence in the sculptural language, as well as, sculptures in iron and blowing glass. The third exhibition of the project will take place at galeria SENDA, during the summer of 2019 with the presentation of a big scale installation created for the architectonic space of the gallery.

Túlio Pinto develops his artistic research through the force of opposites, generating tensions that challenge the physical laws as gravity while remaining in perfect balance. This harmony is achieved through the perfect weighting of the masses, volume and density of materials of opposite natures and behaviours such as cement, iron, rock, glass, plastic and water.

 

“This is how he feels and translates the pulsation of the world of things to be reflected (also) in the world of human relations. An ambiguous game, which, in a first reading may seem circumscribed to the formal combinations that were born from the Brazilian constructivist inheritance or the international minimalism. A second analysis, though, brings the perception that, beyond tradition (which the artist makes reference to and competently and rigorously expands), there is a consistent authorial poetics, which subverts the already established. It indicates urgencies that remain current: the shifting and utopic territory of harmony among opposition”.

Angélica de Moraes (Conjugação de Forças, 2016)

 

The architectural space is closely related to the development of his installations. Pinto takes advantage of the space and appropriates the elements that constitute it. “I am much more a transmission vehicle than a traditional sculptor as I increase in a new impulse the forces present in the objects, putting in evidence these approximations an/or cancellations that are generated” as the artist explain.

 

TÚLIO PINTO                                                         

Born in Brasilia, Brasil in 1974.

Formed in Fine Arts focused in sculpture at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in 2009. Among his main exhibitions we can emphasise Nova Escultura Brasileira at La Caixa Cultura RJ in 2011, Brasil; Ground at Baró gallery in 2013, Brasil; The Vancouver Biennale in 2014, Canada; Onloaded at Phoenix Institute of Contemporary Art in 2015, United States; among others.

His work is part of public collections as:

Institute Figueiredo Ferraz (Ribeirão Preto, Brasil); Ca.Sa Collection (Santiago – Chile); Phoenix Collection (Phoenix, Arizona-USA); Contemporary Museum of Paraná (Curitiba, Brasil); Cultural Foundation Itajaí (Itajaí, Brasil); Contemporary Museum of Rio Grande do Sul (Porto Alegre, Brasil); National Museum of Brasilia (Brasilia, Brasil); Museum of Art of Ribeirão Preto (Ribeirão Preto, Brasil); Municipal Pinacoteca Aldo Locatelli (Porto Alegre, Brasil).

 

Túlio Pinto, Unicórnio, 2015 video 9´51”, Superstition Mountains, Phoenix, Arizona, USA

The calming chants submerged the Baroque church interior with an expression both of reverence and withheld tension. Its worshippers sat in pews, bathed in ethereal glow. With eyes cast down presumably in prayer, the video soon reveals the worshippers’ preoccupancy with the cellphone, a tool that occupies most part of our lives. As the chant changes in dynamics, one may not discern the technological alteration of a bat’s call— mimicking human tonality. As a nocturnal animal, the bat is associated with the Devil in Western culture. The video transitions to an omniscient perspective, with a collective of screens appearing like a constellation of stars.

“Talking to God” hones on the misplacement of technology as a contemporary phenomenon, and the desacralization and decentralization of what is canon. Through representation as a substitute of the real, it shows a group of alienated individuals, in silent bearings of devotion to the unknown. While the environment of a Catholic church suggest an intimate conversation with a Higher Self, or an exaltation of the Faith, the fact that people are absorbed in their cell phones raises a reflection on the role that technologies play in our current lives. Can we update the Faith?

Seldom, as in these times of Internet, we have had the possibility of reaching absolute knowledge and exercising the power of omnipresence. Never before was the human being so close to resembling God, and yet the essential seems to move further and further away. The beauty of the final frame, a distant shot similar to a starry sky, leaves us a possible, optimistic exit, where both elements, the technological and the spiritual, come into harmony.

 

Spools, spindles, mirrors, rotated forms… the body of work presented for this exhibition constitutes a set of videos, annealed and scientific glass sculptures, and large format drawings. All revolve around the same reflection (or vacillation) on the tongue. Further, blown glass is introduced not only as creative and transformative material—unraveling some of the fabrication and manipulation processes natural to the craft—but also as a bridge between object and language, body and word.

A slip, a lapsus linguae: threads, multiple, are infinite. Attempts to translate are though limited and bound to fail, since they cannot but differ from the “original”. After all, they both suggest countless possibilities. Molten glass has to be in permanent movement in order to be shaped; language does too, so to be transformed and not swallowed by immobility. This exhibition invites to think some of these inevitable lapses together, in the intent of language or of the body itself to escape from our mouths. Everything twirls around fire.

Pablo Vindel’s 28 lapsus linguae is a journey through blown glass, video-poetry and drawing as performance documentation, all of which the artist created during and in the aftermath of his recent artist residency at the Creative Glass Center of America and Museum of American Glass. A discursive and aesthetic corpus also based on a two-year experience as Sullivan Scholar through Stetson University (DeLand, Florida)—Stetson brings him in contact with an extraordinary group of experimental poets: sound-poets, video-poets, and concrete poets with whom he has the opportunity to psychologically and physically experience different spaces of the state of Florida (USA), Santiago de Chile and Rio de Janeiro. And last but not least, a profound interest in the materiality of language and its translatability.