Adrián Balseca presents Suspensión I

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.

Adrián Balseca “Phanton Recorder”

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 presents a Solo Show in Artissima

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.

GLENDA LÉON, Celestial Mechanics

Glenda León creates artworks in different languages like videos, photography, installations or public interventions in which she examined the relationship between artificial and natural elements where ordinary objects transform and reveal their metaphorical power. This capacity of creating new meanings through the contextualization, manipulations, and association of the objects work as a sounding board to question big questions.

In Celestial Mechanics, the artist fosters a holistic vision of the universe:  all beings were conceived by the same energy that the Cosmos was created. Thereby, the artist uses an infimum element as it is the butterfly wing dust to promote a metamorphic journey that raises ontological and epistemological issues. Glenda León amplifies the qualities of a fragile material in an action, almost scientific, of discovery and deconstruction of a butterfly from stages of approaches and scales. One of his more intimate parts, the dust of his wins, is taken as material to present imaginaries cosmic landscapes.  The artists get inspired by the second axiom of Kybalión through the teaching of Hermes Trismegistus – ” “As above, so below; as below, so above” – to reflect on nature, her strength and her presence, as part of the indissoluble whole to which we belong. These pieces are grouped under the name Celestial bodies, inspired by Celestial Letters, works by the Cuban artist Loló Soldevilla of mid 20th century.

The use of butterfly wing dust on the work of Glenda León enrolls within that line of her work in which disputes the representation of reality through traditional means and assumes the use of unconventional materials as her own hair, flowers, feathers, cassette tape, gum or sand. Thus, the medium is transformed into the message in a more analog sense of what Marshall McLuhan expresses in his writings. In this way, the butterfly is a symbol of the empowerment of what we badly call ‘weak’; an increased fragility – in this case -, for the negative impact of the exploitation of natural resources.  Perhaps, the importance is not valued in all its magnitude of the existence of the butterfly in vital elements as the contribution to the pollination of flowers, the inclusion in the food chain as nourishment for birds or insectivorous mammals an even as benchmark for ecosystem health scholars.

Complements his work a poetic approach to the contents – so unusual in the current contemporary art – and that the artist considers necessary in the face of the superficiality that constantly surrounds us. Glenda León presents her vision of life as a path of spiritual growth and the role that art may have in this process. The immensity represented by the wings of this little being can become a space to look, to find or to remember the infinite beauty that surrounds us and that sometimes it remains hidden from our eyes.

Oleg Dou

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.

CATALINA JARAMILLO, Heavier than Gold

The new series of watercolor drawings from the Colombian artist Catalina Jaramillo is inspired by the tapestries of “The Lady and the unicorn. This is the name given to a collection of Flamenco tapestries from the XV century frequently considered as one of the most important works of the French revival. Each corresponds to one of the five senses, while the sixth one, which has the inscription “À mon seul désir”,  is associated with love or desire.

In this drawing series, Catalina engages with some of the main symbols of the tapestries and associates them with the steps of the alchemical transformation, making references to the work of Carl Gustav Jung, as well as to several alchemical treaties. In each drawing, the unicorn is the alchemist that purifies through the senses, while the characters assume the transformation.

AITOR ORTIZ

Aitor Ortiz  has developed a solid artistic career disputing the limits of architectural photography. The representation of the building is not seen from a documentary point of view instead refers the image to meta-photographic issues linked to the execution of the photograph or the formal possibilities of the representation itself. With this approach, his work has been extended into a more expanded field that includes the process of construction and perception of the image.

In front of his work, the viewer faces naked architectural constructions where there are no human tracks or elements that serve to contextualize these buildings. The reduction to structures without stylistic references creates doubt if the building is in the construction or degradation phase. This extirpation of all accessory causes the compositions to have a marked geometric character that enhances the structural component of the buildings, attending to their regularity and symmetry. Architecture abandons its third dimension in this way and becomes a two-dimensional and abstract representation that emphasizes its monumental aspect.

Aitor Ortiz also presents an evolution of his work through the combination of artistic languages. The artist does not consider artistic techniques as closed systems, but preliminary mechanisms of creation.We find three-dimensional sculptures made with photographic surfaces in which the author transgresses the traditional categories and extends his experience beyond the limits of the language of photography. This hybridization endows his research with the nature and autonomy of photography of a dialectical process that questions and modifies its own terms. This hybridization endows his research with the nature and autonomy of photography of a dialectical process that questions and modifies its own terms.

On the other hand, the photographs of the Amorfosis series arise from a concrete event that conditions architecture and reveals hidden structural elements or a certain constructive moment, such as a fire for example. Aitor Ortiz records this documentary information in order to reconstruct it later and dissociate it from its imminent obsolescence. This is how the constructive element itself comes into confrontation, the reconfiguration the viewer makes of photography with the tensions between the object of new construction and what the image shows.

Art Brussels 2019

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.

GINO RUBERT, The place to be or not to be

In this new series of large-format paintings, Gino Rubert portrays the world of art: its places, actors and events. The artist in society and in intimacy. To do so, he uses the rhetoric of meta-painting (the painting inside the painting) and also images where we see art galleries full of people attending an inauguration and other empty galleries that only have pictures resting on the floor and facing the wall. On the one hand, from the series The place to be, he talks about social life, glamour and shows business through baroque references such as the variegated horror vacui or symbols typical of Vanitas such as the skull or the soap bubble. On the other hand, the series To be or not to be reflects on the silence, solitude, and vertigo that invades the artist before the leap into the void that represents the night of the premiere.

 

“Even if we are not, are we? If no one looks at us, do we exist?” Gino Rubert

 

As an introduction to the exhibition in which light, colour, and drawing prevail over conceptual drifts, we find a large-format painting that presents the interior of an empty art gallery. In front of it, hundreds of photos and documents archived according to a precise but indecipherable criterion, more reminiscent of the secret record of an obsessive scientist than the photographic archive of an artist. With this scenic installation, Gino Rubert invites us to put ourselves in his place for a moment to understand his work process: “…I usually begin the paintings by spreading out photographic portraits on the canvas (some that I buy in flea markets, others that I have downloaded from the internet or, the most, that I have taken myself). And so, between those characters and myself, we are configuring a scene without previous ideas in such a way that finally the chemistry between those characters/souls and a point of scene direction on my part would be the ingredients of a cake that a priori I never know what form it will have or what it will taste like…”.

Following the trail of previous experimentations on collage and trompe l’oeil such as the use of natural hair in his exhibition Irma Lentamente (2009) or the introduction of text in Exvoto (2014), in the present The place to be or not to be, Gino Rubert introduces lighting on the back of some paintings in order to achieve a greater illusion of depth. As the artist says: “…I have always been particularly interested in that original ambition-function of painting to create the illusion of space; the process of translating with tricks, laws, and ingenuity, the world we perceive in three dimensions to the two-dimensional plane on which we draw…”.

Parallel to the exhibition, we will celebrate the publication of  Sí, quiero edited by Lunwerg and which presents an unusual and exciting portrait of sentimental relationships, with a series of events such as the presentation of the book and a round table.

MIRALDA -Soldats Soldés-

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.