Of the nine books that the poet Sappho (630 BC) composed, only one poem has survived in its entirety. The rest, what has come down to us are fragments, and the poet Anne Carson collects them, translates and reinterprets them in a book of disturbing beauty called ‘If not, winter’, where what we read captivates us especially because of what it is intuited behind those verses.

The artist Jordi Bernadó (Lleida, 1966) is inspired by this title, ‘Si no, el Invierno’ in an exhibition that is a double wink to Safo and Anne Carson to also recover fragments through which he constructs a look at a world, ours, where the ground has begun to crack. And it is from there, from the crack, from where Bernadó tracks the elusive beauty through the tracks it leaves when it retires.

In continuous migration towards territories yet to be discovered and occupied, in a moment of loss of common orientation, the human being needs to land somewhere. Although it is in a question that opens looking for a map of new references and reclaiming old ones. But far from wanting to offer certainties, the images that make up ‘If not, tomorrow’ rather they are signs that point to the emergence of a new reality, signs linked by an invisible thread, a questioning, that orders them.

How to live? How do we inhabit space? What do we do to find a place that is not a mirage?

This exhibition was born from the need to navigate uncertainty, to know how to interpret silences and signals. Perhaps it is no longer enough to make an inventory of man’s mistakes and it is now convenient to glimpse and draw a map of the truths of nature and the exemplary nature of people. And perhaps from there, without losing sight of wonder and doubt, to continue. That everything is ephemeral is also a hypothesis of eternity

Jaume Plensa presents “La Llarga Nit” at Galeria Senda, an exhibition in which he praises the mysteriousness of the night, capable of infusing both stillness and inspiration to the soul of every poet. The works included in the exhibition- ranging from grandiose sculptures suspended by subtle strings, to delicate works on paper- present themselves as a polyphonic choir of figures of dormant and silent appearances, of which a lyrical and contemplative dimension, typical of the spanish artist, stands out. With this new display, which reflects upon the dilation of time imposed by recent global socio-political changes, Plensa suggests that by having been forced to stop the machinery of doing, humanity is putting the machinery of thought into action once again, one which will generate new forms of modus vivendi in the world.

“You weren’t born just to be asleep; you were born to contemplate the long night of your village”
Vicent Andrés Estellés, Propietats de la pena (translation)

A literary imagery characteristic of Blake, Shakespeare or Goethe, among other renowned authors of the past who accompany Plensa in his creative process, the stillness of twilight is a recurrent theme which emerges constantly from the artist’s work throughout his forty years of career. It is in the night’s silence that words, which seek to tell the truth of things, flourish in the artist’s mind, to shape themselves into his work. Darkness isn’t absence of light, it is poetry. Darkness takes you away from reality, it projects images found in one’s memory; it expands space and time. It accompanies man in his hopes of overcoming the limitations of being present and reaching another timeless dimension of poetic imagination. The night is also the door to dreams, that dimension which hopeless romantics described as the language of the soul, which was later considered by Freud to be a privileged pathway to the subconscious’ most intimate desires. It is thus how Plensa invites us once again to close our eyes, in order to listen closely to our most profound being and to abandon the burden of thought altogether.

La Llarga Nit includes a series of large sculptures with which Plensa creates a perfect harmony between light and shadow, silence and words, time and space, idea and creation. In particular, both the dimension of sound as that of light are the invisible raw material of Plensa’s sculptural investigation, from which the human figure springs in a multiplicity of shapes.

The central piece of the exhibition, Minna’s Words presents itself as a monumental presence that simultaneously emanates peace and serenity. This portrait of a young lady, cast in bronze and suspended a few centimetres above the ground, invites silence with the gesture of a hand over her delicate mouth. Detained in a liminal space between the earth and the sky, in the fine line between profanity and divinity, this piece stands out for its symbolic and spiritual weight.

Invisible Ana is an iron mesh head, suspended by subtle strings, which levitates in the room delicately. It is part of a series of portraits Plensa has conceived like metal armour that, instead of shielding the body as a means of protection, evidentiate its fragility and suggest that vulnerability is the veritable human strength.

Almost three meters tall, Laura Asia is a bronze sculpture with which the artist continues his exploration of perspective through the figure’s distortion, a recurrent technique in a lot of his sculptures conceived for public spaces which invites the viewer to come closer to the piece and to envelop it to decipher its optical effect. When looked at directly upfront, the portrait of the young girl seems realistic, but when looked at closely it comes across as a figure that plays with the spectator’s perception. As in all of his bronze and marble portrayals, the features appear to be incredibly soft and smooth, a homage to the purity of youth.

The exhibition further presents a series of works on paper, created by the artist ex profeso for this show. With simple strokes of charcoal on Japan paper, these graceful and unique drawings echo his insatiable study of puerile physiognomies.

Do you want to visit the exhibition virtually? Click here.

Download the press release here.

Download the compilation of reviews and press articles of “La llarga nit” here.

The exhibition brings together the artists who have participated in the Instagram initiative “Welcome Home”, by featuring a selection of the artworks they produced within their domestic confinement, during the lockdown. Ranging from painting to photography, video, drawing, and sculpture, the works result from the drive of their authors to overcome the challenges of the quarantine through imaginative and ingenuous ways of doing and thinking, within and beyond art-making practices. Hence turning their domestic space and time of confinement into an inspiration enabler.

Recalling the 1968 epic science fiction movie 2001 A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubric, DOMESTIC ODYSSEYS addresses the exploration of an unknown domestic life – as opposed to the unknown extraterrestrial life of the futuristic movie. Echoing the voyage to Jupiter imagined by Kubric, the exhibition theme offers a pretext to re-think our relationship with our domestic environment – an intimate space that, during the confinement, has suddenly and paradoxically turned into an unfamiliar and, sometimes, unsettling place of dwelling, into otherness.

 And yet, having transformed their homes into temporary studios (or vice versa), and hence, making a virtue of necessity, the artists of the DOMESTIC ODYSSEYS exhibition have been able to find the most authentic inspiration in their new domestic space. In some way, the artworks featured in the exhibition are the repository of untold intimate domestic tales, joys, and struggles – what we would call «domestic odysseys» – as well as of the desire to re-domesticate our unknown dwelling spaces.

Although they saw their exhibitions and plans for 2020 canceled or postponed, by reinventing themselves within precarious and temporary contingencies, once again they have shown to the world that art, as a form of knowledge production, can acquire multiple shapes, but it never ceases to be and manifest itself. Like in other moments in history, artists have been able to challenge the most critical times, turning art into an inspiring and resilient way of thinking, being, and doing differently.

TEDIUM is a video art screening program, co-curated by Galeria SENDA and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts of Moscow, which features the work of Spanish and Latin American artists with whom Galeria Senda has collaborated throughout almost thirty years: Glenda León (Cuba, 1976), Teresa Serrano (Mexico, 1936), Miguel Angel Rios (Argentina, 1953), Anna Malagrida (Spain, 1970), Isabel Rocamora (Spain, 1968), Adrián Balseca (Ecuador, 1989) and Miralda (Spain, 1942).

With this initiative, the Pushkin Museum invites Galeria SENDA to participate in the museum’s 100 WAYS TO LIVE A MINUTE, a digital project “where people who create and reflect on art share their experiences of meaningful living of time”.

While the curatorial concept behind the program revolves around the notion of “tedium” — understood as a human emotion of inquietude, that results from a particular experience of time —  the final video art selection (defined jointly by SENDA and Pushkin Museum) offers to the digital public of both institutions an overview of the work of some of the most interesting artists from the Ibero-American artistic panorama, who employ the medium of video to explore intimate themes or to address identity, inquietudes and social matters.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” said the seventeenth-century theologist and scientist Blaise Pascale. And yet, these days, we are learning not to fear the silence of time. Confined in our domestic space and forced to reduce our social life and work activity, we experience time’s most unexpected dimensions. Dealing with an unknown pacing of seconds, minutes, hours and days, we are learning to domesticate tedium — an intimate human emotion that has been an object of fascination and exploration of poets and philosophers for centuries — from Lucrecio to Leopardi, to Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde, amongst many others. In this instance, we might also discover that tedium can be a prelude for new ideas, unexpected sense of awareness or artistic inspiration.

Art can teach us a lot about unconventional ways of conceiving and experiencing time. In particular, video art is devoted to a distinct aesthetic (and politics) of time perception, often recalling the emotion of tedium: it breaks with the established modes of moving image storytelling of television and cinema, offering unconventional narrative timing to the eyes and the hears. In some way, video art turns us into pensive spectators, inclined to the patient awaiting of the unexpected, which might never come.

SENDA’s passion for video art is cultivated by supporting artists that work with video and moving images techniques, as well as by fomenting the culture of collecting video art in different ways. For instance, the director of SENDA, Carlos Durán, is the co-founder of the LOOP Barcelona festival and fair, a polyhedric international event, entirely dedicated to moving images arts. Celebrating its 18th edition in November 2020, LOOP has turned Barcelona into a reference of the international video art scene.

The video works featured in TEDIUM will be exclusively broadcasted by Pushkin Museum as part of their 100 WAYS TO LIVE A MINUTE on-line project, in a section, specially designed for this collaboration, of the website https://100waystoliveaminute.pushkinmuseum.art/?lang=en.

TEDIUM will unfold in three appointments: Saturday, May 30, Wednesday June 3, and Saturday June 6. Each day, at 19.00 Moscow time, a series of video artworks will be presented to the public and made available to be watched for 24 hours.

Saturday, May 30 (19:00 Moscow time  / 18:00 Barcelona time)

Glenda León (Cuba, 1976):

Hablando con Dios / Talking to God (2018)

Espejismo II / Mirage II (2019)       

Cada Respiro II  / Each Breath II (2015) 

Suspension / Suspension (2003) 

Anna Malagrida (Spain, 1970):

_El Limpiador de Cristales / The Window Cleaner (2010)

_Frontera / Border (2009)

_Danza de Mujer  / Woman Dance (2007)

Wednesday, June 3 (19:00 Moscow time  / 18:00 Barcelona time)

Adrian Balseca (Ecuador, 1989):

_Grabador Fantasma / Phantom Recorder (2018)

_Suspensión I  / Suspension I (2019) 

_Medio Camino  / Halfway (2010)

Miguel Ángel Ríos (Argentina, 1943):

_Landlocked (2014)

_Piedras Blancas / White Stones(2014)

_Mulas / Mules (2014)

Saturday, June 6 (19:00 Moscow time  / 18:00 Barcelona time)

Isabel Rocamora (Spain, 1968):

_Horizonte de Exilio / Horizon of Exile (2007)

Teresa Serrano (Mexico, 1936):

_A Room of Her Own (2003)

Miralda (Spain, 1955):

_Apocalypse Lamb New York (1989–2018)

_Apocalypse Lamb Barcelona (1997–2018)

The new paintings presented by Peter Halley in Barcelona embody an important step in his career. The classic “cells” and “prisons” with or without a “circuit”, now expand, reshaping the edges of the canvas and leaving the rectangle behind.
Being true to his imagery – created already in the 80s – Halley introduces his sixth exhibition at Galeria Senda, the most committed one.

The colour palette of this new series also manifests a significant change. With an abundance of fluorescent yellow, violets and, above all, pinks (clear, warm and intense), Halley’s compositions become particularly luminous. The artist plays with different layers of preparation to give consistency and depth to the pictorial surface, as well as the use of “Roll-A-Tex”, a lumpy commercial paint, very popular in the 70s and 80s for home decoration, which has accompanied the artist for decades. With this, Halley creates contrasts of textures and reliefs between the compositional elements and combines the industrial and urban register with the sensuality of a tactile experience.

Peter Halley became known in the mid-eighties in New York as the driving force behind Neo-conceptualism, a current that appears as a reaction to Neo-Impressionism and which represents a resurgence of geometric abstraction. His style reflects the idea of language as a stable and self-referential system, and criticises the transcendental claims of minimalism. Furthermore, his work is influenced by the social theory of Structuralism, which proposes the analysis of socio-cultural systems and languages, based on deep symbolic configurations and structures that condition and determine everything that occurs in human activity.

“In our culture, geometry is usually considered a sign of the rational.  I, for whatever reason, have reversed that idea in my mind, and geometry,  has a primarily psychological rather than intellectual significance”, he states in his essay “Geometry and the Social” of 1991.

Thus, the cells and conducts that Peter Halley articulates and combines in his canvases are not a simple abstract geometric composition, but rather a symbolic image of the social schemes that surround us. In this way, the turning point in the format that Halley presents in the exhibition New Paintings in Senda Gallery also reflects a turn in his analysis of the models of organisation and communication in contemporary societies.

Examining these new works, it can be seen that these cells no longer fit into the regular structure of the canvas, but rather – as a metaphor of today’s society – establish a different relationship with it.  Opting for free and open forms, the cells impose their own designs, challenging the rectangular and immobile structure of the traditional canvas.  The irregular compositions that result from these formal searches by Peter Halley, although rigorously balanced and harmonious, seem to describe the profound changes in society in the digital era, as well as in the system of cognitive work.  Thus, through an internal metamorphosis in Halley’s iconic visual language, the American artist’s pictorial discourse echoes the flow of information generated by the new technologies, as well as the new communication regimes, usually dominated by the younger generation.

Escritos sobre arte (Senda Ensayo, 2020), the volume to be presented in the context of Peter Halley’s New Paintings exhibition is the first Spanish translation of the most innovative and personal essays written by Halley from 1981 to 2001. While offering a critical view of the changes affecting the field of art and culture in the period of so-called “post-modernity”, these texts offer a different approach to Peter Halley’s experience and his exquisite intellectual work.