AES+F, Mare Mediterraneum

The Mediterranean Sea is the reservoir of civilization – its heart has pumped people, cultures, and religions from shore to shore like blood. The Phoenicians and Carthaginians flowed north, the Romans and Crusaders south, the Genoese east, Byzantines west, the Islamic Caliphates east, west, north, and south. Sicily is right in the middle and the waves of storms of all civilizations have splashed on her shores. This is still happening today.

The Mediterranean Sea is once again the epicenter of ideological contradiction. War has pushed refugees and migrants who, saving themselves, have floated and swum across it to confront Europe with a difficult choice. (In ancient myth Europa herself was also forced to cross this sea). Their choice has already led to politically charged and ideological confrontations, to the polarization of public opinion and to the rise of xenophobia and ethnic violence.

This tragic situation has become a political conflict as well as the subject of negotiation and ideological speculation. In this form, it has been transmitted by media as a meme in what is now described as ‘post-truth’. The ethical situation that has unfolded out of this is paradoxical, to say the least.

Making porcelain figurines on this subject could be thought an extreme manifestation of this paradox yet, through its distance, an artistic image may be more radical than reality itself because it can push conceptual limits.

Porcelain has always been a symbol of contentment and bourgeois comfort. The recent waves of migrations have confronted Europe with a dilemma: whether to accept refugees – allowing them to enter at the cost of the material and psychological comfort of their hosts; or to reject them in an immoral, inhumane, and cynical act that would undermine the co-operative ethical basis of Europe itself.

Comfort is both fallible and fragile, like the porcelain that is associated with it. Kept safe for generations in high places, porcelain figurines are attentively guarded but their fragility encapsulates the threat of instantaneous loss. They shatter easily.

The chosen form and material of these works contrast with the drama of what is unfolding in the Mediterranean today, and, by doing so, point to it. A reflected ray of light illuminates better than a direct one. We think that this holds true concerning this work.

Edited by David Elliott

Mare Mediterraneum

The Mediterranean — a territory where, in significant part, modern human civilization was born, with its culture and three most prevalent religions.
From the Roman Empire to the Arab caliphate, to the colonial wars and now the European Union, the territory around the Mediterranean Sea at times formed one culture and government, and at times split in bloody religious and territorial conflict.

Now we are once again living in an epoch of global change — cultural, demographic, political, and economic. The Mediterranean, like in the past, is in the epicenter of these events. We are once again seeing mass migration of people, armed conflicts, but also brilliant displays of humanity and empathy.

The project consists from the series of 9 porcelain figurines, colorfully painted in the tradition of 18th century European porcelain, and a multimedia installation (for exhibitions), depicting various states of the sea — calm or storm.

Túlio Pinto, 41° 23′ 20” N 2° 10′ 34’’ E and 41° 25′ 21” N 2° 12′ 32’’ E: Three Times

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

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.

 

Glenda León “Talking to God”

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.

 

Ballenesque, Roger Ballen: a retrospective at LAB 36 from galeria SENDA

 

Roger Ballen challenges the ways which we perceive the “reality” of photography. His ambiguous and surprising portraits of people, animals or objects posing in rooms that resembling prison cells, who occupy the grey space between reality and fiction, blurring the borders between the documentary photography and the artistic forms as painting and sculpture.

Working where the difference between reality and fiction does not have relevance, disturbing and claustrophobic scenarios are presented to get us closer to his history. These interiors are inhabited by characters trapped in a marginal atmosphere, where the narrative thread is ambiguity. The rooms are real places, but they appear disturbing and strange, logical but also completely impossible: The walls are scribbled, covered with stains and handing wires;  A multitud of strange objects and artefects are acattered on the ground: animals move roam the space or they’re stuck in impossible containers. All the characters seem strange, but at the same time provided with great expressive force that displays a hopeful poetic turn and upsets the indicial disturbing impact.

The selection of photographs that Roger Ballen will be present at LAB 36 belongs to his new book Ballenesque, an exhaustive retrospective of his work. Based in a new evaluation of his photographer’s archive, the book takes its title from the artist surname and takes the reader on a visual and chronological tour of his work. The exhibition of LA 36 explores the stages of this creative journey and briefly recreates the Ballenesque’s project through a selection of works from different series and with the inclusion of some of the most iconic photograph as well as unpublished works in a compendium of the trajectory of a whole life. This is will be the fourth individual exhibition of the photographer with galeria SENDA.

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.

Pablo Vindel presents 28 Lapsus Linguae in Lab 36 de galeria SENDA

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.