By Cecilia Durán

Galeria Senda welcomed spring with “Day and Night: New Paintings and Drawings,” the first exhibition in Spain of renowned American artist Donald Sultan. Consisting of a collection of large sacale pieces with the mimosa flower as its motif, Sultan demonstrated that a result can be accomplished with an unusual formula. It’s the case of Spring Mimosa Dec 12: painted flowers that were watered with tar and enamel, instead of water. 

You are probably thinking: still life? The frenzy over dead nature and wine glasses left undrunk has long been dead, hasn’t it? The bread crumbs, the pear, the worm-eaten apple…Or those who opt for flowers, in order to come across as romantics, or perhaps because they were on offer and spring isn’t the season for pears. A white canvas, stained with the pigment of earthy colours — green, brown and dijon yellow. 

Perhaps the death of conventional still life paintings did occur. Cézanne took with him the last sigh of the  artist-admirer-of-fainted-fruits-over-ceramics, and Van Gogh that of sunflowers, which turned their heads away from the minds of those who claim to “know about art.” Maybe only a few of us still find peace in the representation of nature, even if it doesn’t come accompanied with conceptual affairs and ulterior motives. A bouquet of marigold, a strawberry, a landscape or something as mundane as a cigarette that dances in the darkness of a flat near 6 W & 24th st. 

Sometimes that’s all one needs. A breath of relief in the stifle that becomes living in a time where one suffers from having to narrow their taste to a world that is quick to decide who is worthy of taking up a white wall and who will never leave their paint and hormone scented room. 

Forget about the white wall, and while you are at it, forget the white canvas too. Instead, picture yourself in a concrete plant, where the tar fumes and the heat emerging from the pyramid of pebbles conceal your lungs and make your blood boil. In the midst of all that industrial landscape — metal, wood, iron and fire — grows a flower. It isn’t easy to imagine, in fact, it’s almost impossible for a flower to grow among so much hardship, yet, against all odds, it does. It is an orange flower, round like the sun, like the moon, like a dandelion that hasn’t granted its wish yet. 

Cézanne’s still life emits an aroma of a tablecloth marinated with peach nectar and the little puddle that your father spilled in what was his fourth glass of wine. Van Gogh’s sunflower brings about the smell of summer fields and the distant saltiness of the sea. However, Donald Sultan’s mimosas play with your senses: you can see minimal circles, surrounded by a bunch of olive leaves and it makes you think: south of France, dry and fruity air… but when you get closer to the piece all schemes fall down. You no longer think of the French countryside, but of the way there —  the voyage. The heat emerging from the asphalt when you step off the car to spread your legs, and the smell of tar coming from a factory that was built far from human life; to avoid shortening the very same with the impurity of the fumes steaming from its high chimneys. 

You see, Cézanne’s provincial scenery and Van Gogh’s thick-brushtroked flowers had become far removed from my mental archive of beloved pieces. It’s not that I don’t admire the works, nor a need for art to tell me “something.” It’s more that I am in a constant quest of works that will allow me to appreciate beauty in a world in which very rarely beauty comes without aftershocks. To believe, for once, that within industrial land, life can grow. 

If you get close to Sultan’s work you’ll be able to ‘smell’ your childhood in the countryside, the sweet taste of sun-ripened fruit, and the breeze that caresses your skin as you read under the olive tree on a sunny August afternoon… although what you are really smelling is masonite, enamel and tar. 

I think that is the whole point of it — stimulating your senses with what you think it is, what you would like it to be and what it truly is. If you wish to see it for yourself, the exhibition will be open until the end of July.

On June 18th the MARCO museum of Vigo will have the opening of Glenda León’s “Música de las formas”, which has been commissioned by José Jiménez.

The cuban artist return with a series of works which are representative of the bond between poetry and objects, thus creating a synthesis between visual and sonic worlds. León uses mundane objects and raw materials and she transforms them in a way that reveals their metaphorical power. That way, the works present a sensible look towards what is quotidian. His works transit between spheres of intimacy and openness, manifesting her ability to create new meanings through a process of contextualising, manipulating and associating objects.

In “Música de las formas,” the artist evidenciares music’s influence on her growth, both on a personal and an artistic level, and how interconnected it is to the movement of the stars. José Jiménez mentions Pithagoras to justify this phenomenon to which the latter refers to as the “cosmo’s harmony” as well. León manages to connect the ground with the sky, the mundane and the extraordinary.

Estrellas Masticadas (2015) is a great example of the aforementioned, given that the artist creates celestial bodies by linking together gums that were disposed and stuck to the ground. By doing so she is creating a debate between the mundanity of something so basic as chewing gum and the solemnity of those starts that so many other geniuses had observed in a past.

The exhibit can be seen until October 31st.

All those months spent inside feeling trapped within four walls triggered Peter Halley into re-thinking the artistic world he had been inventing since the 80’s. Changes in mode of life resulted in changes in mode of expression, as the New Yorker began to opt for alternative confines to his previously “conduit” and “cell-like” paintings. 

Nine months after his exhibition New Paintings at galeria Senda, Peter Halley has taken his laberinthian explosion of colors to the walls of the Nivola Museum in Orani, Sardegna. ANTESTERIA, which gives name to the exhibit, references the Greek festivity in devotion of the god Dyonisus and the arrival of spring.

Parting away from the static, rectangular and lethargic aspect of the conventional canvas, Halley has adapted his color induced shapes to the walls of the museum in a manner resemblant to those done by previous artists throughout history. Reminiscent of the legacy that traces back to cave paintings all the way to fourteenth-century fresco paintings such as those done by Giotto in the Arena Chapel at Padua, Halley has brought out a cathartic experience by combining his signature neon colored shapes with the geometric motifs of the room. The arched windows, with stained glasses similar to those in churches, are in conversation with the dynamic and psychedelic paintings of the American artist. 

A pristine place brought to life; a secular space made to receive an attention that dances the line between admiration and devotion. The signature cell structure of Halley’s work is distorted, made to appear as a continuum of lines that lead the viewer’s gaze from one side of the room to the other, stopping in between to stare into the kaleidoscopic splatters on the west and east walls, as well as the lower panels, which combine geometric shapes with more free draw lines. 

Peter Halley is reinventing himself according to the contemporary world we live in. His art fluctuates in the same way customs, culture and capitalism do. He proved so when he exhibited New Paintings in the gallery last September, when he moved away from the square canvas and took on a different meaning for it. To him the canvas no longer ought to be static, but by combining luminous colors with irregular confines, he contrasted textures and reliefs that brought together the industrial and urban register, and the sensuality of tactile experience. 

To the artist, the cells and conducts are not simply geometric compositions, but rather, symbolic images of the social schemes that surround us. A turn in his analysis of the models of organisation and communication in contemporary societies. 

ANTESTERIA will be exhibited until August 22nd.

On May 25, Yago Hortal presented his first monograph at the ONA bookstore on Pau Claris street.

Yago Hortal participates in a talk, mediated by journalist Bibiana Ballbè, which invites the public to learn about his artistic career and his creative process.

His first monograph, produced by Senda Ensayo, reviews his artistic production over the last 15 years, tracing the evolution of his work during this time, and giving a glimpse of the new direction of his work in search of new horizons.

Hortal’s work, which from the beginning has been committed to redefining the formalism of abstract painting, functions on a metalinguistic level, and celebrates the dialogue of the work and its own process of creation.

Yago Hortal (Barcelona, 1983), studied Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona and the University of Seville. In 2007, one year after graduating, he wins the 49th Prize for Young Painters. The following year, at only 25 years of age, he began to exhibit not only in Spain but also in the rest of Europe and the United States. His paintings maintain a tight relationship between the work of art and action painting itself. The canvas forms part of a performance in which the artist consciously creates spontaneous color forms in an infinite gamma, expressing passion and vibrancy. The painting seems to come out of the canvas, causing a desire to touch it and creating textural sensations.

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