Exhibitions

Oculto en la sombra. Sucediendo en el margen. Disolviendo la forma. Curator: Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo Carla Souto Nicolás Combarro Elena Asins Gabriel Alonso Taxio Ardanaz Esther Gatón From January 14 to February 25 Santiago

Darkness is my breeding ground. Darkness is an enchantress. I am talking to you and I risk disconnection, I am subtly unreachable by my knowledge.

I am at this moment in a white void waiting for the next moment. Counting time is only a working hypothesis. But what exists is perishable, and this forces the counting of time to be immutable and permanent. It has never begun and will never end. It never will.

And I live on the sidelines, in a place where the central light does not burn me. And I speak very softly so that my ears are forced to be attentive and listen to me.

I am hearing that whistle in the dark. I, who am sick with the human condition. I rebel, I don't want to be human anymore.

 

Clarice Lispector, Agua viva, 1973

 

 

Closing your eyes tightly. Even then we do not manage to stay in absolute darkness. The black behind the membranes of the eyelids membranes is surrounded by a reddish reverberation. As the action of closing becomes stronger, the more white flashes appear and disappear. Open the eyes and look directly at a source of light. The clarity is such that you cannot distinguish other contours either. It is a white, glowing darkness. Half-open your eyes and look directly at the sun. The circle is the only thing ever present, vibrant.

Human eyes are not useful in total blackness or full luminosity. Their perceptive function is disrupted, almost annulled. We have to learn to relate to the other, to those around us - entities, stories - with their forms that dissolve before our vision, before our logic. The normativized intellect is overcome as the only agent of ordering the world.

The skin, like that of the eyelid, is now the interface, extended. The whisper, in a silence that is never absolute, is what gives us clues. The body, in time and space, takes on another density, another measure, another way of moving.

Here, we try steps of new choreographies that go through physical, temporal, but also material, mathematical, narrative layers... beings of unthinkable compositions, algorithms understood as open cycles and not as computed limits, the subaltern voices of those who lived in a margin of the defined and absolute structure, who gave body and air and were plunged into oblivion, fences of fields that are there to be jumped, bureaucracies that do not define an identity or a relationship with the earth.

We want to overcome the dark-light, civilized-wild and human-nature binomial, whose limits are erased in a proposal to look again not (only) with the eyes. To open up to other possibilities of new conceptions of space and to the recognition of other agencies that inhabit it - hidden in the shadow, happening on the margin - that dissolve the form, the consensual one, and give the time to propose new modes of relationship. The need for a defined outline has also been overcome, not by denying its identification, but by denying everything that is left out of it: the history of the winners, the globalized socioeconomic systems, the useful and utilitarian productivity, the existing in all its potentiality.

Among all of us, artists and works and all those who move rhythmically or not around them, words are cross each other in silence, echoes of questions and possibilities, in a slow and low voice dialogue.

In the skin of the rock remains the trace of the hammer struck by the anonymous hand. But it is dark and only by going down to the subway and opening the shutter with a new light, we see it. And at the same time it becomes abstraction in the grain of the photograph. To rescue its pre-essence, like that of the industrial material gathered, resignified and endowed with another stability, under the pressure of the hand that moulds the putty and the glare of the blurred color. To face this reverberation of tones where the forms of the image and the sign of power are guessed, in a war front between the monument and those who live around it. To inhabit the multiple geometric areas, which dot the terrain infiltrating the superstructure, where the body lies down to measure them, and the word, in an absurd semantic construction, claims them. A new situation for a score of ignored life cycles, of appearance and disappearance, represented in the printed form, but also in the pink light that allows inner growths and that bathes everything. And then, to discover traces, organic in their essence, but also of inanimate or emotional origins, in a series of compendiums of the impossibilities of feeling.

Then, in the movement, in the choreography, in the stories that filter, in the pressure of the skin, the possibility of exorcism of the rational is produced, of the sensory encounter with what has been called unreal or nonexistent. Here, one can begin, unclassifiably, the multiple attempts to be.

 

Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo

 


Artists


Gabriel Alonso

https://gabrielalonso.net/

(Madrid, 1986) Visual artist, his training has been developed between Madrid, Berlin and New York. In his works, through different formats such as installation, sculpture, photography or video, he investigates the contemporary relationships between aesthetics, science and post-naturalness. In her latest projects she explores the post-Romantic vision and the conjunction of components of the natural, the activation of the change of perspective of the look in the relations between archaeology, geology and human culture.

In 2020 she founded the Institute of Post-Natural Studies (https://instituteforpostnaturalstudies.org/), a platform dedicated to research and creation from which to critically propose new approaches to artistic practice through political ecology, post-natural aesthetics and new creative ethics that contribute to the dissolution of the nature-culture binomial.

His work has been shown in different galleries and international exhibitions in Matadero 2019 (Madrid), John Doe Gallery 2018 (New York), IIAF 2018 (New York), Poor Media Leuven 2016 (Belgium), Espacio Las Aguas 2015 (Madrid), Mila Gallery 2014 (Berlin), among other spaces. He has been an assistant professor at Barnadr College of Columbia University (NYC) and in the Master in Advanced Architectural Projects of ETSAM, besides having given numerous conferences in different international institutions, museums and universities. In 2020 he was awarded the Madrid City Council Creation Scholarship for his project The Mammalian Retina. In 2015 he received the FAD award for his publication Desierto, and in 2016 he received the Fine Art Grant from the Graham Foundation.

 

Elena Asins

https://www.galeriafreijo.com/es/artistas/states-y-fondos/elena-asins

(Madrid, 1940 - Azpirotz, 2015). Artist, writer, lecturer and art critic. She was self-taught by choice in its most fundamental aspects, studied sporadically and more experimentally than in school, at the School of Fine Arts in Paris, at the University of Stuttgart (semiotics with Professor Max Bense), Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Calculation Center), New York (The New School for Social Research and Columbia University, Department of Computer Science: Computer Art), where she was invited as a Visiting Scholar for research on digital application in the visual arts.

She made more than 40 individual exhibitions in different countries. As a theoretical work, she developed and published an extensive series of essays on aesthetics and experimental poetry in specialized art publications in Spain, France, Germany and the United States.

In 2006 she was awarded the Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts, in 2011 she received the National Prize of Plastic Arts and the MNCARS presented the retrospective exhibition Elena Asins. Fragments of memory. In 2012 he received the Art and Patronage Award, La Caixa Foundation, Barcelona.

One of her most important contributions was research on computers in art, a work in which she was a pioneer since 1967. The last contributions of her work were directed towards urbanism as aesthetics and as a necessity, to architecture as a habitat and to the aesthetic intervention of space and time in general. During the last five years of her life, she worked on video and music; the result was a series of video art pieces, entitled Antigone by Sophocles.

Taxio Ardanaz

http://www.taxioardanaz.com/

(Pamplona - Iruñea, 1978). Graduated in Fine Arts by the University of the Basque Country, he has extended his training in seminars and workshops given by artists and curators such as Itziar Okariz, Esther Ferrer, Julie Mehretu, Miroslaw Balka or Peio Aguirre. In recent years she has carried out residencies in Italy, Iraqi Kurdistan, Cuba, Austria, Mexico and China.

Her artistic work focuses on the study of the different modes of representation of political ideals in moments of absolute faith, based on memorial constructions and the physical and ideological remains that these situations of high conflict have left among us. Through the investigations of these situations and their physical testimonies, it seeks to explore the capacity of art to respond to personal and collective needs in resistance to an always adverse reality.

He has exhibited individually in Madrid: Tabacalera Promoción del Arte (2017), Raquel Ponce Gallery (2013), RMS El espacio (2011); Bilbao: Carreras Múgica Gallery (2017), Gio Bat (2015), Sala Rekalde (2014); Havana: Artist x Artist (2016); Mexico City: Ateneo Español de México (2012), AN Studio (2011), and Pamplona: Polvorín de la Ciudadela (2008). Among other collective exhibitions, he has participated in "Entornos Próximos 2008", Artium, Vitoria-Gasteiz.

He has received numerous scholarships for artistic creation and different recognitions, like the First Prize in the XV Pamplona Young Artists Contest (1999) and the Second Prize in the XXIV Navarre Encounters Contest (2007); being selected in the Itzal Aktiboa Prize (2018), Ciutat de Palma Prize (2014), International Plastic Arts Contest of Pollença (2010) and the itinerant exhibition Ertibil (2008), among others.

 

Nicolas Combarro

http://nicolascombarro.com/

(A Coruña, 1979). He uses different artistic forms such as photography, installation or cinema, he is also a teacher and independent curator of exhibitions. His work is the result of research on the process of transformation of the built space. The reflection and interaction with the constructions and the materials of the environment, either through photography, painting or sculpture, allow him to look for the essence of its form, playing with its inorganic nature towards an organic reinterpretation of it, proposing an active contemplation that produces a certain disposition or expansion of the sensibility, at a formal but also conceptual level, in relation to the historical and socioeconomic structural dispositions.

 As an artist, he has had individual exhibitions in museums such as the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris), the CGAC (Santiago de Compostela), MARCO (Vigo), Palexco (A Coruña), Institut Français (Madrid), OCEMX (Mexico City) and in galleries such as Solo Galerie (Paris), Moriarty Gallery (Madrid), Kwanhoon Gallery (Seoul), Taché Gallery (Barcelona) or the PABLO Gallery (Manila). He has made site specific pieces in the I Manila Bienale (Philippines), Tabacalera (Madrid), Kreativquartier (Munich), 42 Salón Nacional de artistas (Cartagena de Indias) and has participated in the Spanish Pavilion of the XV Venice Architecture Biennale, among others.

He has obtained scholarships and awards such as the scholarship of the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome, 20th Fotopress scholarship of La Caixa, Laureat of the Cité Internationale des Arts of Paris, the Saab Award for the best exhibition of the Off Festival of Photoespaña, First Prize of Photography INJUVE.

He has directed the documentary feature film Alberto García-Alix. La línea de sombra, premiered at the San Sebastian International Film Festival and awarded in different film festivals such as Guadalajara or Toulouse.

Among others, he has published the books Interventions (RM), Arquitectura y resistencia (Editorial Cabeza de Chorlito) and Arquitectura Espontánea (Fundación La Caixa)

 

Esther Gatón

http://esthergaton.net/

(Valladolid, 1988). D. in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid, she has completed her training at the University of Liège, Barcelona and this same year at Goldsmith, London, where she received her MFA.

She builds specific environments for each space through sculptures, audiovisual pieces or lighting. With his work, he distorts the meanings that each material carries, giving rise to forms that modify our movement or posture, since the form that prevails is not what the object does, but what it makes do.

His work has been exhibited in institutions such as Matadero Madrid, La Casa Encendida, Museo Patio Herreriano, Museo Picasso Barcelona, Fabra I Coats, Etopía Zaragoza, Biblioteca Rio Grande Brasil, CENTEX Valparaíso Chile and The Watch Berlin. He has published texts in La Raya Verde, El Estado Mental, Materiales Concretos and Nero. He has recently received awards from Circuitos de las Artes Plásticas, Injuve and Ayudas a la Creación de la Comunidad de Madrid.

 

Carla Souto

https://carlasouto.com/

(A Coruña, 1994). Graduated in Fine Arts at the University of Vigo, she has continued her education at the Universidade do Porto specializing in Multimedia Art, at CEART-UDESC in Florianópolis she approached the work from and for the body with special mention in Visual Arts, Performing Arts and Fashion, and finally in the Master in Sculpture at the University of Lisbon.

From all her destinations she has derived a way of working situated, in relation to the environment, interacting from the care and the poetics. Carla's body of work flows between formats, media and techniques: her projects range from painting, performance, photographic documentation or video; also textile creation with embroidery or pattern making are part of her artistic practice.

Her work has been exhibited in Sant Andreu Contemporani (Barcelona), Sala Amadís (Madrid), ART Mustang (Elche), Galeria Monumental (Lisbon), Pazo da Cultura de Pontevedra and Museu da Imagem e Som de Florianópolis (Brazil) among other places where she has ended up. Among her awards, Carla has VI Puénting Scholarship of artistic professionalization and INJUVE 2019 in Production modality. She has also recently participated in the Artistic Residencies of the Bienal de Cerveira 2017 in Portugal and KH Messen in Norway.

 

Curatorial Project

 

Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo

Curator and independent critic

Its main lines of work focus, firstly, on the analysis of artistic work and its perception in society, a study that began with the development of the independent project for the analysis and exhibition of the working conditions of contemporary artists, and that continues today under the name of Work - Do +. The last stage of this project, carried out at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome, has served as the material for a first written essay on the project (in preparation). He has also carried out projects and participated in groups such as Histórias em Display (WT), a collective interdisciplinary research, for the study of contemporary art as a critical discourse in the construction of historical narratives.

Always in relation to these two lines of research, she has curated Felipe Ehrenberg 67//15 at Galería Freijo, the public program Partituras Visuales interpretations of Ehrenberg's actions, in Nadie Nunca Nada No; Almudena Lobera. Technical Images at Tabacalera, History is written by the winners at OTR. Art Space, After, Depois, Según, in Salón, Madrid, Spain; Partir do erro and Trabalhe + Faça -, in Galeria Pilar, Ícaro Lira, Campo Geral, in Galeria Central, O sublime e a distopia in Kunsthalle, and Emmathomastheca: Arquivo aberto da Senhora Thomas at Emma Thomas Gallery in São Paulo, Brazil; Rafa Munárriz, Sulla curva chiusa at Galeria Macca, Cagliari, Italy; The way you read a book is different to how I tell you a story, at Jahn und Jahn, Munich, Germany; or the program Aplicación de las diferentes teorías de flujo, with Carlos Amorales and Los Torreznos, Galería Barro, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

He has written numerous texts for artists -Carlos Irijalba, Bruno Moreschi, Cristina Garrido, Ana Esteve Reig, Yoshua Okón, Omar Barquet, Jose Luis Landet, Mauro Giaconni, Sara & André, Tercerunquinto, Alberto Casari, Fábio Tremonte, Pontogor, Marlon de Azambuja, Ricardo Alcaide, Julius Heinemann, or Victor Leguy. He also collaborates with the publications Arte! Brasileiros, Arte Al Día, artishock, and is a regular critic for El Cultural del Mundo and a-desk.org.

She has a degree in Art History from the Universidad Complutense, a master's degree in Cultural Management from the Instituto Ortega y Gasset, both in Madrid, Spain; as a curator she is part of the ICI New York (Bogotá, 2013). She was editor and coordinator of the site masdearte.com between 2001 and 2003. That year she moved to South America, first in Chile, where she collaborated with the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Cultural Center of Spain. In 2009 she moves to Brazil where she works as director of the Baró Galeria. Between August 2012 and July 2013 she was director of Pivô, an independent space located in the Copan Building in São Paulo. In 2016 she was part of the Critics Group of the Centro Cultural São Paulo, accompanying the Exhibition Program of that year. She was the curator of the Associate Artists Programm, Liverpool Biennial & ICI. Back in Spain, she has been director of LOOP Barcelona 2017, resident at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome, 2018-2019, and is professor of Curatorial Practices of the Master of the SUR School (Univ. Carlos III, Círculo de Bellas Artes).

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