At the entrance of the gallery, Marlon de Azambuja’s video offers a surprising change in scale and a sensual bond to a building in Panama. Once we see “Cariñoso”, with it’s explicit smallness, and the tenderness of its action, we can’t hold anymore a preconception of what a building can do.
Jorge Diezma’s heavy, loaded with varnish paintings are a kind of machines –machines made to produce a notion of time. “Around fifteen years ago – Jorge says – I decided to try to paint like Zurbaran. I never got even close, but I keep trying”. Then, could these small paintings, with the cracked surface, be a 17th century baroque still life? We think they can.
Cliff Evan’s video-“sketches” for a virtual monument to J. G. Ballard, work by escalation, feverishly piling up layers of exhaust fumes and claustrophobic highways. Shot in familiar interstate and inter-city corridors in the state of Texas—where the artist grew up, this overlapping of memories with the influence of the writings of Ballard is the beginning point of an implausible construct to stitch their worlds together.
Elena Blasco tests our resilience with a dark green color. Can a trapezoidal object of this color be a coquettish girl? Or, will this image persist, permanently imprinted on us – a girl, who is a ponytailed dark green object?
With “Pyrite”, an augmented reality app, Augmented Mountain directly makes us rearrange the image of the “given”. Without reluctance, we play, and by playing, we gradually destabilize reality. A lucky brainwave has jumped into material existence.
The actions of Heleno Bernardi, captured on stark black and white photographs could be the literal manifestation of the philosophical syllogism “therefore”, but perhaps they are more about Socrates’ image than Socrates’ mortality. Heleno’s pieces reveal the kind of uninhibited transposition and loving tenderness towards the dichotomy beauty-thought, as Marlon’s do toward architecture. “Apologia de Socrates” dismantles the problem with an exquisite minimalism, washing away Socrates’ head and producing soap bubbles.
In another brainwave materialization, Almudena Baeza takes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s opening paragraph of The Crack-Up, and spends a year in her Paris studio, painting slowly (but changing her decisions rapidly and repeatedly) a triptych on tablecloths, 160×160 cm each, which had been saved from a fire in Peru. “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside-the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick—the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.”
In Marina Zurkow’s installation two tyvek animal body bags lay on the floor, slightly open from their bellies, shooting towards the edge of the gallery’s ceiling bright lines of an imaginary viscera. “Body Bags for Animals” are part of Zurkow’s major work “Necrocracy”, a meditation on geology, time, nature and petrochemical production.
Unrelated, but interesting was the question: What does semantic black market means for Marina? That the black market is just semantic? That it is just semantics to call it “black”?
In “Location one and two” Eva Davidova penetrates a concrete corner of an undefined construction with her bare hand, as if reaching for its guts. But we don’t get to see if the guts are bloody or radiant—it is an obsessive situation with no resolution. The action gets amplified through the rhythm and repetition of the loop, eventually dissolving any narrative.
«Flotation after Marcel Broodthaers» is Juan Ugalde’s reinterpretation of Marcel Broodthaers «La Pluie» (projet pour un texte) from 1969. In this case, rather than a project for a text, it is a project for drawing, having breakfast and reading the news simultaneously. It originates in the idea, in contemporary society, of flotation of many disparate elements into an alleged drift of thought. The rain falling over the watercolors could be the lucky portrayal of a Broodthaers-que idea: painting for entertainment.
The observed gets up, and gets dressed. Gets dressed for my eyes.
The observed gets up, and leaves.
Almudena Baeza 