Platform for the Support, Promotion and Publicising of Contemporary Artists
PROCESOS VISIBLES
PROCESOS VISIBLES
(December 2020 Edition)
ASUNCIÓN MOLINOS GORDO
Selected by the curator Virginia Torrente. Represented by Travesía Cuatro
STATEMENT
Asunción Molinos Gordo is a researcher and visual artist. Her practice is strongly influenced by disciplines such as anthropology, sociology and cultural studies.
The main focus of her work is contemporary peasantry and its cultural production. She questions the categories that define “innovation” in mainstream discourses today, working to generate a less urban-centric way of understanding progress.
She has produced work reflecting on land usage, nomad architecture, farmers’ strikes, bureaucracy on territory, transformation of rural labor, biotechnology and global food trade.
ACTIVITIES WITH THE ARTIST* (Only available in Spanish)
STATEMENT
In my work there is an insistence on the habitability of spaces, which leads to a questioning of the "domestication" of the modern inhabitant, the consumption of certain formalizations and objects in the interiors of current homes, as well as an autobiographical reference that articulates a discourse on individual and collective memory.
In that recurrence to the image of places and their appropriation through art, in my work, currently, the city, the public space, appears as the privileged scene of everyday life, with its wealth, misery and creative potential. Through series of drawings, photographs, site specifics, sculptures, inspired by objects from our consumer society and the city; how in the control and separation devices of urban space. My work talks about how we identify with our environment and its architecture, and how they influence us.
Distinguishing between the lived, experiential or existential space that operates unconsciously, and the physical and geometric space. I also emphasize different intellectual states that are produced when relating to our immediate surroundings, how the importance of peripheral vision that integrates us in space, and makes us see details and situations that sometimes go unnoticed, going from being mere spectators to be stimulated towards other muscular and tactile sensations.
The body as a place of perception, where our memory capacity would be impossible without a body memory, we remember through our bodies as well as through our nervous system.
ACTIVITIES WITH THE ARTIST* (Only available in Spanish)
VALERIA MACULAN
Selected by the curator Virginia Torrente. Represented by Smart Gallery
STATEMENT
"It is me, but I am also the other, the dead one."
Jorge Luis Borges
‘Frame’: an object of rigid structure whose limit that separates it,
of what it is not, is forceful and precise.
The question about the limits of the painting, or rather, until where extend things can be stressed, has been running through my work for many years.
My projects deal with the limits of the pictorial plane and its uses as a meaning to question how a body can be expressed psychologically, physically, and socially. I search for symbolic ways to create a non-verbal language using different materials. I try to communicate the inexpressible: the intuitive and irrational element of human experience and relationships.
ACTIVITIES WITH THE ARTIST* (Only available in Spanish)
AMAYA HERNÁNDEZ
Selected by the curator Virginia Torrente
STATEMENT
I often think think about a plot of land on San Bernardo Street. Years ago there was a hospital. One of its rooms had a very special meaning to me. The construction was demolished and there is a big uninhabited hole now. However, when I pass by, I cannot find anything more restless than observing this small floating space in the void...
We make empty spaces ours. With architecture, we define, structure and transform the void, turning it into living spaces. We adapt to it and it becomes our own. The light that enters in our living rooms is altered and modified, it moves slowly forward reminding us the passing of time... but when everything vanishes , it is then that it becomes vertiginous... we need artifice, simulation and simulacrum.
ACTIVITIES WITH THE ARTIST* (Only available in Spanish)
GORKA MOHAMED
Selected by the curator Pilar Soler. Represented by Marta Cervera Gallery
STATEMENT
There is a tension in my paintings between the irrational and other more fixed and organised structures. The work shows the tension of the contemporary individual invaded by an environment which is more and more emotionless and alienating, which shrinks and invalidates him in a socio-political context where there is not a real possibility of choice; a world grotesquely saturated by images and information that cancel a critical aptitude towards what is happening, and that invites us to passivity. Following these thoughts, I understand the way of "thinking through painting" as a process associated with a reversal of values, an absence of limits, and as a life project.
There is also an anxiety to unravel visually the different weaves and layers of our cultural surrounding’s reality. Furthermore, there is an insistence to adhere elements already contaminated and crumbled by the semantics, raising with simplicity a new look on the ruins of modernity and our cultural reality.
In my recent works, I am interested in building characters out of an accumulation of shapes, forms and objects. This approach in painting could be compared with the process of constructing sculptures or assemblages. Besides, the paintings embrace a polymorphous perversity close to the one that takes place in classical cartoons. Through this pictorial language there is the intention to reflect on the things that are affecting us psychologically in our sociocultural reality, as if the fact of presenting the toxic found in humanity would work as the catalyst of its own remedy.
ACTIVITIES WITH THE ARTIST* (Only available in Spanish)
STATEMENT
Galician artist trained in the Basque sculptural tradition, his work shows interest in the superficiality and appearance of objects and images through materials, shapes, composition and technique, taking a starting point of synthesis. The combination of the familiar and decontextualization become keys in his projects, letting himself be carried away by the event of showing.
ACTIVITIES WITH THE ARTIST* (Only available in Spanish)
CLARA SÁNCHEZ SALAS
Selected by curator Virginia Torrente. Represented by ATM Gallery
STATEMENT
The work of Clara Sánchez Sala develops bonds between literature and routines from a poetic point of view using objects from daily life in a first instance, but working with varied techniques and materials, for the purpose of creating a speech always referred to the complex world of fiction that we human beings generate in that incessant un- estrangement in which the meeting with the external world consists, and that we usually call: real.
ACTIVITIES WITH THE ARTIST* (Only available in Spanish)
RAÚL DÍAZ REYES
Selected by curator Virginia Torrente. Represented by Ponce + Robles Gallery
STATEMENT
Raúl Díaz Reyes is a multi-media artist based in Madrid. His work breaks the frontiers between disciplines, taking us into a decisive contemporaneity, in which all languages drift away from the standard and invite us to knock into shape a panoramic look of our surroundings. The union that is established with architecture, and the mash-up of materials, talks to us about cities in relationship with their inhabitants as dynamic systems in constant movement and alteration.
This way, there are no dimensional limits, no technical laws: the photograph is contemplated as a sculpture, and the painting gets into it. The results of this reflection on the city as a place for interaction and change question exhibition models, alters codes, and generate new landscapes with multiple possibilities
ACTIVITIES WITH THE ARTIST* (Only available in Spanish)
PATRICIA ESQUIVIAS
Selected by curator Pilar Soler
STATEMENT
The work of Patricia Esquivias (Caracas, 1979) is mostly presented in video format. In her stories, architecture, history and folklore are blended in a unique manner, stemming from the personal in order to reach the universal. She is a narrator that in a deadpan manner, urges us to question given historical frames, re-signifying history and opening leads to a new way of reading modernity and its constructions. With a very personal undertake, her work mixes fantasy and reality in equal proportions inciting the viewers to question their factual knowledge and understanding of history and society.
A universe where the life of others, as in All the Names (Todos os nomes, the novel that José Saramago wrote in 1997, where the main character works at the Town Central Registration Office and collects information on others), are key to her practice. Esquivias’ work would not exist without those lives that crossed paths with hers; different types of people somehow connected to her fields of interest that call her attention and her will of retrieving a moment in history, claiming its relevance in the present moment. A work where these encounters open a door to explore the breakage generated by the transit from modernity to the present time, questioning its relevance and impact on our current society. In this way we, the spectators, become subjects of the stories she tells, questioning also our way of living.
ACTIVITIES WITH THE ARTIST* (Only available in Spanish)
ANTONIO BALLESTER MORENO
Selected by curator Pilar Soler. Represented by Maisterravalbuena Gallery
BIO
Antonio Ballester Moreno. 1977. Lives and works in Madrid.
He has had solo exhibitions at the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid, at La Casa Encendida in Madrid, MAZ in Guadalajara, Mexico, MUSAC in León, at the MaisterraValbuena Gallery in Madrid, Pedro Cera in Lisbon, Christopher Grimes in Santa Monica and at Peres Projects both in Berlin and Los Angeles.
He has also participated in group exhibitions such as the 33 Bienal de Sao Paulo, the CA2M in Madrid, the MUSAC in León, as well as in galleries in New York, Berlin and Los Angeles, among others.
His work is in the collections of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, MUSAC in León, the CA2M in Madrid, the Iberdrola Collection and the Helga de Alvear Foundation.
ACTIVITIES WITH THE ARTIST* (Only available in Spanish)
CRISTINA MEJÍAS
Selected by curator Virginia Torrente
STATEMENT
We have got used to accepting the academic world as the legitimate container and transmitter of learning. Today, the responsibility for preserving knowledge is deposited in writing applied to a screen or to paper, after which it then lies in libraries, be they physical or virtual. We have the luxury of being able to forget something because we can always retrieve it from books.
But libraries need to be driven by our desire in order to take on life. It’s not enough to keep a leaf in a herbarium; a living plant is ravaged by the air and it’s important this takes place.
My work is normally predicated on familiar narrations, those far from traditional methods used to construct history by means of a linear narrative, and closer to those passed on from mouth to mouth and keep the shape and voice of the one who tells them and the listener who listens.
ACTIVIDADES CON LA ARTISTA* (Only available in Spanish)
ANA MARTÍNEZ FERNÁNDEZ
Selected by curator Virginia Torrente
STATEMENT
Ana Martínez Fernández (Madrid, 1982) studied Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country, as well as Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths College University in London. Previous exhibitions include: "La más mala", supermala.europe, 2020; "sueño>suelo", Salón (Madrid) 2019; "Tongue finishes back at the root of itself", Pehu (Osaka) 2019; "Giz a Kess", Alimentación30 (Madrid) 2019.
Her practice is based on the observation of the complexity in social narratives through artifice, and the absence or presence of innocence, especially in the implications of the consumption of products or media. She is interested in investigating the ambivalence in the appropriation and representation of images or fictions from the vulnerability of intimacy, as well as exploring the mechanisms of desire and perception through the implicit seduction of objects and texts.
ACTIVITIES WITH THE ARTIST* (Only available in Spanish)
