MIGUEL ANGEL RÍOS, Landlocked

In his work, Miguel Angel Ríos pairs a rigorous conceptual approach with a meticulously constructed, often handmade aesthetic. Since the 1970s, he has made work about the concept of the “Latin American,” using this idea as both an artistic strategy and a political problem. Since the early-2000s, Ríos has also delved into the medium of video to create symbolic narratives about human experience, violence, and mortality.

LANDLOCKED: Bolivia has suffered since several centuries access block to the Pacific Ocean. The video Landlocked is a Metaphor of desire of the unreachable. Dogs of the high mountains from the Andes foothills, were trained to dig and execute their work, creating an illusion to get to the Ocean.

MIRALDA. Three Projects (NYC-MIA-BCN)

The exhibition MIRALDA THREE PROJECTS (NYC-MIA-BCN) will present original works, records and documentary archives of The Last Ingredients (MIA), Apocalypsis Lamb (NY-BCN) and Santa Eulalia. 175 (BCN).

The Last Ingredients was a performance of a procession of vehicles and a public feast in Miami in 2016, which celebrated the opening of the Faena Forum Art Center of Rem Koolhaas. The Bedspread Apocalypsis Lamb was part of the Honeymoon project in which an imaginary wedding between the Statue of Liberty of NY and the Columbus Monument of Barcelona was held; In 1989 the Bedspread took part in the Columbus Day tour in New York City and in 1995 hundreds of people carried it to the MNAC where was raised and in which it remains as part of the permanent collection. Finally, Santa Eulalia. 175 consisted of a performance with a procession of 80 musicians and 150 banners, as well as a series of festive events on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of Santa Eulalia store in 2018.

Photos, drawings, videos, objects, collages, etc., will be shown as record material and this will allow the viewer to get an idea of the scope and complexity of each of these works with the public intervention of participatory and processional character and that characterizes the artist.

 

YAGO HORTAL, Rigor and Pink

Yago Hortal poses in Rigor y Rosa an exercise of synthesis and confrontation of the semantic of his language and stresses the foundations of his painting through an inversion of the assimilated concepts and a resignation of his comfort zone. In an introspective challenge and through a formal reduction of expressive mediums he bares his work into form and background thus reaffirming his practice.

Through a visual palette endowed with a great variety of tones and fluorescent colours, Yago Hortal inverts the duality of neutral background and relevance of the brushstroke to deepen in the specificities of his praxis and to give value to the whole painting. In the optical cognitive illusions, as the Rubin’s Vase investigated by the psychologist Edgar Rubin and developed by Gestalt theory, it is produced the multistable perception or tendency to jump back and forth between two or more interpretations, in this way Hortal plays with the alternation of the role of the background and figure. Thus, he emphasizes the entire pictorial surface and claims the contribution of the background as a positive space to perceive in an autonomous way and on equal terms with the brushstroke of the foreground.

This synthetics artworks stripped of all artifice and allow the viewer to appreciate with greater clarity the energetic brushstrokes generated by acceleration rhythms and pause that flow into the composition as a color explosion. Furthermore, these brushstrokes become more stylized and lead the way of the look providing a sense of movement to the representation. This process of deconstruction emphasizes the traceability of the creative process through the evidence of the used technique with the splashes and drips of paint cut out on the background. In this way, the forms expand all over the linen, process that culminates in the expansion of the painting beyond the limits of the canvas, endowing the artifacts with a marked sculptural character. In a new impulse, Yago Hortal often uses polyptychs of different measures and provisions that burst into the architectural space by adding the vacuum in which they are reflected and merged the colors as pictorial surface to apprehend.

Ola Kolehmainen presents “Sacred Spaces”

Ola Kolehmainen received in 2014 a commission of the Borusan Collection of Istanbul to develop a photographic project about the Byzantine tradition and the mosques built by the ottoman architect Mimar Sinan. Ola Kolehmainen’s work has always been characterized by reflecting images of contemporary architecture and in this occasion, and for the first time, historical buildings became the object of work. When he was developing Istanbul series, Kolehmainen conceived in parallel the idea of Sacred Spaces’s ones in which spirituality is linked again with contemporary creation through an extensive study of the aesthetic and historic legacy of the religious architecture.

The process of photographing antic empty buildings took him almost fourth years. The pieces are the result of an exhausting research of lighting and framings, based only on the natural light and artificial pre-existing of the building without any type of effect or manipulation. Each place required very careful selected moment to capture a specific light of the desired enviroment.

In some photos of this series Kolehmainen develops a new visual approach based on the fragmentation and deconstruction technique. The views of the spaces are divided and reassembled again in a by-chance-collage through multiples perspectives that create one unique image. In this way, the photos offer a three-dimensional feeling from the use of wide depth field and ranch of lights and shadows. Ola compares this technique of framed details with the reading of a book:

 

“You get caught. Stuck on details. Drawn in. We get to go back. Focus on a point of reference. The frame helps us focus on the details within it”

The result of the project becomes a visual celebration where the atmosphere and the light are the common thread that weaves images of main monotheistic religious buildings. The ancient churches, synagogues and mosques contribute in the work of the artist with a new research paradigm in the research that captures sublimity and mysticism. At the same time, his work reflexes the points in common and underlines the mutual influences of the deferens religions inviting the viewer to the reflection about universal nature of Sacred Spaces.

Francis Ruyter “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”

The title of the present exhibition Let Us Now Praise Famous Men refers to the book of the same name written by James Agee and illustrated with photographs by Walker Evans. Published in 1941, it documented rural life in the United States during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Francis Ruyter uses appropriationism as a tool; all the paintings have as reference photographs of the huge patrimony treasured by the Library of Congress of the United States. It is one of the largest archives in the world created from the funds of the Farm Secure Administration and the Office of War Information: black and white images that portray the life of the Americans between 1935 and 1944. These images, produced through gubernamental agencies, transcend the propaganda and, at the end, have become a reference for the American identity. It is a file reviewed by multiple authors with a generative character as it is digitized and disseminated.

The archival objects of the post-industrial era have already been subjected to systems of order and reclassification and lately they are divided in a global scheme through the Internet. The growing presence of data banks, image files and visual interfaces allow us to trace Ruyter’s interest in photographic archives. This can be compare with technological ruins that face the changes of the scientific and social knowledge that provides Ruyter’s paintings a contextual depth of referents connected by interrelated nodes.

The artistic process of Francis Ruyter merges new technologies with traditional techniques of drawing and painting. Ruyter uses monochrome paint and permanent marker to recreate the images of these photographs. These works deployed visually as abstract paintings despite their figurative origin. We are faced with synthetic works with a marked tone reduction, painted with non-naturalistic colours at all, and composed of energetic colour planes. This saturated chromaticism comes violent in conflict with our perception of the photographic act as a graphic document that brings verisimilitude to the image. The contours divide the surface into planes of shadows clueless in a representation in which the illusion of depth is eliminated. This denial of the volume reduces to the minimum expression the photographic origin of the image as the language of light and emphasizes the markedly two-dimensional character of the work.

 

Teresa Serrano, The forgotten history of the first drug war

Without any doubt drug trafficking and the war against drugs in Mexico has generate a rich popular imagination around it. This set of strongly symbolic images has disrupted lot of the relations that we build with the culture that drift in the drugs world and with the nature related to it.

The case of poppies (Papaver Rhoeas L.)  is definitive of this demonization of the nature related with drugs. Once common silvester plant, today is a beautiful flower demonized for its uses on the production of narcotics, for this reason, its a flower that have lost its natural condition on the loose. It has turned in a covert flower, prisoner in the clandestine laboratories of drugs.

In a very acute way, Teresa Serrano has treated not only  with reflexión and criticism but also poethicaly the politics related with the war against drugs in her native country, Mexico, starting with the poppies as a powerful argument.

In 2016, she dedicated herself to the production of 24 poppies that, like the artista explain, were “directly painted with acrylics on Fabriano paper, Strathmore and Canson paper folders, without previous drawing. Paintings made in a purist and botanic way. They are tribute to the beautiful flower of the poppy, red and velvety flower that produces heroine. Due to the war against drug trafficking in Mexico, the flower doesn’t grow spontaneously in the field. It has being stigmatized. It is just in possession of the traffickers that have caused the death of more than 60.000 deaths in mexican land, that reminds to a mass grave of missing persons”

This repetitive gesture around reproduction of poppies that reminds the well known aphorism of Gertrude Stein: “a rose is a rose is a rose”, had in turn its counterpart in a video production: technique in which Teresa Serrano is pioneer in Latin America.

Her video Amapola also from 2016, is a paradigmatic work not only because of the topic by itself but also of the artistic production of this important Mexican artist. On it, she recovers the flower from its stigma, and in a gesture of resistance against its negative condition, enriches it from a kinder and more universal imagination, because Teresa Serrano sings Amapola in her video, a very famous song of the cadiz composer José María Lacalle: a popular and classical hymn about this flower. The video undoubtedly puts both universes in tension – the negative, represented in a single poppy in the middle of a vast field – and the positive, embodied in the romantic and sentimental song of Lacalle.

However, The forgotten history of the first drug war is an even more suggestive project because it crystallizes the historical dimension that the work of this artist already has, showing the attentive look that Serrano has always devoted in his work to the  sexual, social, political and religious tensions in the world of today. This is evidenced by the incorporation into the exhibition of six historical pieces, made a quarter of a century before and on this same subject.

In 1993 Teresa Serrano addressed the problems of what was then the first war on drugs in a series of diptychs made with collage and painting. In these works the artist incorporates the poppies from an imaginative register in which the flower was not the secret and negative plant of our days, even though during those years she was suffering her first battles from the Mexican anti-narco organizations and the American DEA. In the diptychs, the flowers face their derived products from the commercial scope of old and kind pharmaceutical advertisements. This “mirroring” condition is doubled since the collage is made with the proper ads of the poppy derivatives while the painting and the drawing delineates the flowers themselves.

These diptychs announced in turn, thanks to the textual inscriptions of Serrano, that the present of the flower was that of his first war. Paradoxically, these sentences placed the beautiful painted or drawn poppies and their pharmaceutical products in the romantic space of their history.

With The forgotten history of the first drug war the artist reminds us that this war is already a forgotten story (and perhaps a lost war) and that the poppy is living a permanent conflict for its natural subsistence away from this rather artificial war against drug trafficking and his negative imaginary. At least the poppy survives, against the current of its disappearance, in the intelligent and subtle work of Teresa Serrano.

Carlos Palacios

Catalina Jaramillo presents “Las Palabras del Optimista”

The Colombian artist Catalina Jaramillo presents her latest work  Las Palabras del Optimista around the sixth edition of ArtNou Barcelona 2017, event that is responsible for generating a boost to emerging art and the new artistic generations. 

Jaramillo is a young artist  graduated in visual arts in the National University of Colombia. Her work revolves around contemplation, with constants reference to literature, fiction and her own biography using the drawing in non-traditional media. Her pieces has been exhibited individually in deferents galleries in Latin America.

The Spirit of Imagination by Jordi Bernadó & Quimet Sabaté

The history of discoveries it is understood through chance and serendipity. In this case it is a story of crossed roads between two persons that created their Works from two opposing points of views what occupies us. The exhibition invites us to reflect to what extent we have control in our lives and professional careers, or about the games the future holds for us.

In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose

The New York trilogy, Paul Austier

The origin of the chain of coincidences draw from an artistic project of galleria SENDA that analyse the Rambla’s transits, main tourist artery of Barcelona, through the eyes of the recognized photographers Massimo Vitali and Jordi Bernadó. Vitali focus his work on the leisure spaces and hence on public spaces, on his part Bernadó discover us the inner of its buildings. After more than a year of work, the exhibition is finally placed in Arts Santa Mònica of Barcelona by the offering on the initiative of the institution.

While looking for extravagant places, Jordi Bernadó submerged himself in the underworlds of La Rambla and went in El Portal de la Pau, in the Quimet Sabaté studio. It is a unique painter’s workshop exaggerated and open to the public. In the first meeting, Jordi Bernadó took pictures and included them in the exhibition of Art Santa Mònica.

And so, in gratitude with his hospitality, Jordi hive as a gift a batch of his photography books to Quimet Sabaté. At that time, he activates unconsciously a two-way path. Quimet Sabaté decide to tear some pages away of Jordi’s books to use them as canvas, painting surrealistic elements and reproducing new compositions as of the original photographs. This works were sold as souvenir to tourists for a small fee.

It was only later when Bernadó discover that his pictures have been reused. At that moment he decides to exhibit his photographs adding the wrested pages painted by Sabaté in his exhibition “Fragmentos para una cronotopografía del simulacro” hold in MACUF in Coruña (2011).

Some months ago, Bernadó decided to take a new look of Sabaté’s studio containing a number of the photography’s intervened by the painter. In the present exhibition, we meet the result of this relationship and this ramified path through Bernadó’s photographs and Sabaté’s contributions.

Bernadó’s production of the last years is characterized by the induction to doubt, if the images he present are an expression of what we are looking to or just a simulation. Quimet use Bernadó’s photos adding erotic imagery and stereotypical surrealistic elements, creating a humorous vision without a further intellectual pretension. In this sense, we find images where the ambiguity, the paradox and the misrepresentation of Bernadó are merged with the superimposed fictions of Sabaté. The result is a game of mirrors that delve in the concept of representation as a simulation.

STEPHAN BALKENHOL, New Sculptures

Stephan Balkenhol is characterized by his strive to reground figurative sculpture. His ability to
carve, alongside a constant investigation of the role of sculpture within the contemporary art
production, make him stand out from the prevailing tendencies. The artist uses soft wood, such
as Popler and Wawa, which can be seen in the reminiscent chisel marks, cracks or knots left as a
hint to his technique. Balkenhol uses for the most of his works a single block of wood,
polychromatic, delimiting the sculpture from its own pedestal, which is carved in a totem style.
His way of carving wood is, in a way, a continuation of the popular and medieval techniques.

The human figure is usually the driving force of his work. His characters are generally
anonymous men and women, with expressionless faces that are often depicted standing and
ordinarily dressed. Their postures, however, seem rather trivial and mysterious. The lack of
expression makes the game of interpretation quite difficult, but its presence hooks the viewer
to the gaze of these human sized figures. Elements that can be regarded as capricious, such as
the position of the hands or the inclination of the heads, become the hidden keys that reveal
the relationship between the figures, as well as tightening the link between the statues, the
viewer and the locations they occupy.

Balkenhol is able to strengthen his work with the viewer, who immerses himself In a deep
atmosphere of complicity. It is his link with what is contemporary that makes him differ
between sculptural scale, which he takes to be the ideal scale, and the human scale, considered
the mere standard. The artist says the following, as a way of inviting us to dechypher his secret
‘my sculptures do not narrate. There is something secret about them and It is not I who ought
to betray their secret’.

Meridianos by Sandra Vásquez de la Horra

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.

This exhibition represents a technical evolution of her work. Sandra keeps on her personal technique of sealed drawings with transparent wax film, that gives permanence and protection to the artwork. In past exhibitions she presented her drawings in installations of small papers habitually distributed in diverse forms. These structures were intertwined asymmetrically without narrative content. On this occasion, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra presents big size work fractionated in sheets of paper that make up a unique artwork. This change of the scale increases our approach towards the artwork. They are pieces of human size and proportional to spectator which radiate a kind of voyeurism, and they fix the public’s gaze on a sort of direct confrontation.

Moreover, Vásquez de la Horra has started to work with three-dimensional pieces made by paper with drawn surfaces. These simple structures with prism shape are similar to architectonic constructions of little houses. Each one of the four sides of the houses is composed by an independent pictorial plane, where the spectator fuse in, in a total connection with the artwork. The inspiration for these houses was the childhood memories of the artist in Viña del Mar, Chile. The modernist house was the artist has grown up with big windows that shown a park with huge green environment, where it was located. 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.

As a further step, Sandra Vasquez de la Horra will presenting as well, a sequence of ceramic sculptures recently produced in a ceramic workshop in Barcelona, and that she will be using as preliminary works to produce for the very first time a bronze sculpture.