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INTERLUDIO 2: NUNCA NADA PARECIDO. ÁNGELA CUADRA AND LAURA F. GIBELLINI

Faced with the challenge of revealing the invisible, the artists Laura F. Gibellini and Ángela Cuadra delve into the mechanisms through which what is hidden, vanished or intangible is built, generating representation strategies for it. In this sense, Nunca nada parecido gathers recent works by both artists that deal with a subject that, although intelligible, is imperceptible.

Works that portray into visual what cannot be seen by an innocent gaze. What we know is there, we feel its presence, but whose effort of visual representation poses a broad cognitive challenge. And this, without a doubt, occupies a fundamental place even in the smallest daily dynamics of the present times. There is something there, however ethereal, hidden, impalpable, we know that there it is.

Laura F. Gibellini‘s project for the exhibition intends to make visible the existence of an air that until recently we took for granted and that nevertheless today has become an element that we have to verify at every step. The artist’s works resort to the meteorological or atmospheric conditions of certain places to investigate those elements that are in the limits of the visible and, therefore, in the limits of what can be thought.

Stemming from an expanded drawing, the artist overcomes the two-dimensional dogmas of traditional drawing towards the realization of immersive spatial projects. The visibility of the air is formalized in her works from the drawing of light, the perception of the influence of astronomical phenomena, or else, from the poetic and metaphorical exercise that links breathing made difficult by the high altitude of the Jungfrau in the Alps with the glass blown by the expiration and inspiration of the furnace master of the Royal Glass Factory of La Granja with whom she has collaborated for this project.

Ángela Cuadra, on the other hand, investigates images that deal with concealment techniques used throughout recent history, in an extensive phenomenological study of invisibility. By examining the tensions between the natural and the artificial, the public and the private, the whole and the parts, the essential and the superfluous, the artist uses a material with pre-existing historical and semantic charges to reconvert and resignify it. Based on collage and approached from the intuition, her works induce compositions in which the found material is barely elaborated with prominence to the forms themselves through their juxtaposition with other materials.

The special focus on the dialogue between fragments, on the emotion that arises when finding chords of color, shape or texture, resembles the perception of her work to that of a musical composition. To make language without literature, to make music without melody, to make paintings without paint. To build from the base of what is given, of what is in the margins.

Nada nunca parecido is the second edition of Interludios, a set of short-term exhibitions at NF/ NIEVES FERNÁNDEZ, whose proposal is to create a visibility space for projects designed by artists, whether or not represented by the gallery, and which until then have not have been possible.

Laura F. Gibellini’s project has been carried out thanks to the aid for the creation of visual arts from the Community of Madrid in the year 2020.

Jordi Alcaraz. Cosas elementales.

Alcaraz’s discourse stems from the classical tradition of painting and sculpture, arriving to a reflection on volume, language and time through the use of materials, such as water, glass, mirrors, reflections, or books that include this idea.

In his artistic language the visual transgression predominates, a playful dynamic among many different gazes and the combination of transparencies and holes that allow a glimpse of hidden, magical spaces. Thus Jordi Alcaraz establishes, through his works, an unprecedented, surprising and metaphorical relationship with the world.

Sculptures, paintings and drawings, always through his peculiar treatment of materials, and his poetic word games and unexpected titles. Sets of pigment bags that sink into glass surfaces, poetically showing the beginning of the painting, wooden sculptures that pierce the acrylic urn in which they are in, passing from the darkness of the night to the light of day, colors that flee from their cans through imaginary holes, impossible portraits.

Due to his obsession with the craft of art, in his works he delves into the almost obsessive exploration of the artist’s work: drawing, sculpting, painting …, focusing rather in the exercise of doing, than in the works as the completion of an action. As a result, absence seems to be more relevant than evidence in the works. The absence of almost everything, and the utmost importance to the disappearance of the work, with the permanence of the action. What matters is the sensation of drawing, what is there at the precise moment before doing it, the impression at the end, but not the work itself, not the resulting drawing. There is no image or reference to any idea, the artist draws but there is no drawing left. We can see the space that has been left, the trace of the material used, but the absence of anything else is almost absolute.

Jordi Alcaraz breaks the material in different ways, everything is less evocative and more poignant. Layers of materials are superimposed as protective shields, and they build diverse and more complex layers of meaning.

His works can be found in collections such as Biedermann Museum, Donaueschingen (Germany), Colección Fontanal Cisneros, Miami; Williams Collection, Massachusetts; Olor Visual, Barcelona; or Fundación Banco Sabadell.

Rafael Grassi PRESENCIAS

In his works, Rafael Grassi reconciles the attachment for the pictorial matter and the intention to create an illusion of perspective, a deceitful figurative image. Figures are the starting point that gradually dissolves, getting free from pre-conceived meanings, and generating a pictorial surface full of paradoxes and chromatic diversity.

Formal analogies and linguistic pollutions are some of the ideas drafted in his work, some of the strategies used by the artist to prove the nature, possibilities and boundaries of the physic and conceptual materials he uses. Drawing, photography and painting are mixed in a creative process in which the working methodologies of each of them are exchanged in a game of roles and breaking ups. The elements conquer now an autonomy free of any concrete meaning.

EXHIBITION VISIT:

Presencias. Rafael Grassi, at NF/ NIEVES FERNÁNDEZ

INTERLUDIO 1: Fin de partie. JORDI TEIXIDOR

Le Danse, L’atelier Rouge (1911), View of Notre Dame (1914) or Porte-fenêtre à Collioure (1914)… The works by Henri Matisse have been, for me, sometimes during very extensive periods, a clear and assumed reference that have opened path to projects that, at the same time, ended up being artworks.

In 2002, I realized the first sketch of reflection from the painting Bathers by a river (1909-1916), part of the collection at the Art Institute Chicago.

I entitled La Rivière to this journey through the works of Matisse, and it ultimately extends until 2020 and which succession is described by Mariano Navarro in the catalogue of the exhibition Los límites de la pintura, currently on view at the Centro José Guerrero in Granada.

During this long period of time, in which sketches, drawings and intentions have been accumulated, I have only made two big paintings, in 2004. However, both have been destroyed. After eighteen years, in September 2020, I conclude the series La Rivière with the painting Fin de partie.

Without discarding the allusion to the work by Samuel Beckett, author I am very fond of, the title Fin de partie is a clear reference to a chess game: when there are few pieces left on the board and everything seems lost, one has to ditch the king.

This painting is, therefore, the culmination of interests, dedication and reflections that have made possible its realization. In its contemplation there can be appreciated its intentioned lack of representation. Neither does the work allude to something out of itself, producing in its sight an uncomfortable sensation as consequence of a present absence, of the non-narrative that, in compensation, returns us the gaze to an open and new experience. Success does not rely in the end but in recognizing failure, defeat, in which limit we can expect only continuity and, hence, the artwork contains nothing, maybe time.

Jordi Teixidor. November, 2020.

Pretérito perfecto. Ângela Ferreira, Grada Kilomba y Rogelio López Cuenca.

The exhibition Pretérito Perfecto aims towards generating an encounter between the current moment and its preludes in the past.

The artists that compose the exhibition share an understanding of art as a critical tool for research: Ângela Ferreira, Grada Kilomba and Rogelio López Cuenca, from different countries and alluding to different contexts, develop artistic practices that meet and resonate among themselves, and in which they explore and reflect on several moments of History. Throughout their respective careers, these artists have worked on colonialism, states of exception, silencing and other issues structurally encrusted in our societies and, with their counter-hegemonic gaze, keep on pushing the boundaries of the established discourses. The work on memory they carry out on perceiving the past as a moment of time in constant revision, generates disruptive forms and opens to diverse formalizations that contribute to new possibilities of seeing and understanding the world today.

Hence, in this exhibition, several time layers: the reference to Spain’s recent past through the non-fictional, the reinterpretation of fouding classics of European culture or the hommage to different figures or utopian episodes of the 20th Century History in Portugal, Mozambique, Democratic Republic of the Congo and other countries.

Pretérito Perfecto [Past Perfect] is, therefore, a title charged with irony, that questions our relation with History and implies that we rely on its critical study to shed light on past episodes and its consequnces in the present.

Bruno Leitão, curator of Pretérito Perfecto

Ângela Ferreira (Maputo, 1958), her artistic practice is focused in the analisis of consequences from colonialism and postcolonialism in the contemporary world: a research scope where identity and the configuration of a modern movement  play a central role in contexts subdued to a colonial past.

Grada Kilomba (Lisbon, 1968) is an interdisciplinary artist know for her work centered on the examination of memory, trauma, gender, racism and postcolonialism. Her work is realized in different formats, from texts, stage reading and acting, until videos, theatrical installations, in what she entitles ‘Performing Knowledge’.

The works of Rogelio López Cuenca (Nerja, 1959) abounds on language, mass media, migration crises, historic memory and, in general, power dynamics in current society. At the exhibiton, the artworks presented are co-produced with Elo Vega (Huelva, 1965).

ONLINE GUIDED TOUR WITH THE CURATOR, BRUNO LEITÃO

PAST PERFECT TALKS: Ângela Ferreira and Bruno Leitão (in English)

PAST PERFECT TALKS: Rogelio López Cuenca y Bruno Leitão (in Spanish)

PAST PERFECT TALKS: Grada Kilomba and Bruno Leitão (in English)

VIRTUAL TOUR HERE

Arnulf Rainer. Visages

With a selection of artworks spanning from 1970 to 2002, Visages reviews the importance of faces in the work of Arnulf Rainer through three different series: his self-portraits or Face farces, the Death Masks or Totenmaskes and finally the veiled pictures or Schleierbildern, in which the artist uses as a departure point preexisting images from the history of art.

With the prominence of the Face Farces, which depict a person who can only express himself through the movements of his body, in an attempt of the artist to dissolve himself, as a metaphoric gesture of the oblivion, completely deliberated, of what art is, this exhibition gathers a series of works that insist the whole of art can find its origins in an artist. Either a naked man without any tools for the act of painting, overflowed by painting, either his gaze covering preexisting images.

The overpaintings of the Schleierbilder are the physical trace of this gaze, without the intention of adding any further meaning to the previous image, but rather remove excess meaning anchored to the image through habits and historicization of art.

Just as Cézanne, undaunted, observed his apples and his mountains, and day by day helped them to life in his painting, so too does Rainer tirelessly recounts what he observes, day by day, in art, paintings and life. Jean-Michel Foray

Tamara Arroyo. Pura calle.

Pura calle is Tamara Arroyo’s first exhibition at NF/ NIEVES FERNÁNDEZ and gathers brand new artworks with a set of previous pieces that represent her body of work throughout the last years.

This selection dialogues with the different matters approached by the artist in her work – using her life experiences as a starting point – such as her daily strolls through the city, in which she finds wastes of the processes of ‘domestication’ of the modern citizen.

In this sense, the group of selected artworks questions the consumption mechanisms of certain formalizations and objects within contemporary households, articulated by a few of the artist’s autobiographical references that, ultimately, establish a discourse on collective and individual memories.

The urban locus from where these works emerge is the landmark used by Tamara Arroyo to observe the architectural processes resulting from the social constraints in the construction of space.

The public realm, as a privileged space for everyday life, is a reservoir of identity signs and creative potential. Tamara Arroyo, hence, frictions the capabilities that both the context and the architecture have to influence their inhabitants and, through diverse formalizations, her artworks evoke these issues, distinguishing between spaces whether lived, experiential or existential, that operates unconsciously and the physical and geometrical space.

Her work emphasizes on the mental states that derive from relations with our immediate surrounding, such as belonging, integration and critique, in an effort to foster in the audience other sensations, views and interactions.

Moris. Allá afuera hay una bala para todos.

Allá afuera hay una bala para todos is Moris’ second exhibition at NF/NIEVES FERNÁNDEZ. The artist participated in the São Paulo and Havana Biennials, as well as in group shows at the JUMEX Foundation in Mexico City, Fontanals Cisneros Foundation in Miami, ARTIUM in Vitoria, MUSAC in León and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. Also, he has had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Museo Carrillo Gil and Sala Siqueiros, both in Mexico City, and the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, among others.

His works can be found in the collections of MoMA New York, Pérez Art Museum Miami, JUMEX Foundation, CIFO Foundation, ARTIUM, MOCA Los Angeles, Museo Amparo in Puebla, Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, or the Isabel and Agustín Coppel Collection in Mexico City..

“We suppress the stage and the hall, which are replaced by a sort of single space, without separations or walls of any sort, that concentrates the actual theater of action […] by the fact that the audience, placed in the middle of the action, is involved and cleaved by it”. First Manifesto for a Theatre of Cruelty, Antonin Artaud.

It is common belief that the artist and the audience are not equals. That the art upholds an exhibition and that the viewer activates the whole mechanism. That the gallery exists to exhibit the works and that people visit the space to maybe leave enlightened, doubtful, moved. Moris entails factors of different natures to such equation from the concept and the production of what is exhibited, even throughout the gesture of transferring everything from one country to another, its respective economic and spatial constraints, the impossibility that turns feasible the construction that it pretends and the deconstruction that ties the argument by which the installations are links to a route of stakes in an empty host that is ultimately a parenthesis and a reflector for a short while. The art, supposedly, must be something and few of us are the ones who learn (by unlearning), from the absence of choice to be artists, that the art must not be art, but rather language, singularity and incident. The art produced under such conditions would be similar to a cartridges’ factory, not by its mass or its unstoppable process line, but in its specificity, in its raw power: each bullet will be a direct contact with a target, with a type of flesh, with some sort of death.

In a certain narrative, as if it was some of the fables taken by Moris to his prints, one could imagine that wherever this cartridge is shot from, the bullet shall hit, infallibly, the observer. Such certainty of this moment is evidenced by the percussion, the scale of order in space and the shape and function of the individual within the invisible. The spectator stems from the same origins as the art, with the only exception that his storyline is the platform from which the art argues. The main character, here and now, is used by the language to perform something unfolding in the eyes of the audience, under a perspective without closing or beginning, but rather latent moments that occur when they are found within its margins. The outside is the reverse side of the place, in which the creator disappears and, in his absence, the visitor emerges and produces the emerging of the artwork, surrounded with opacity, immersed in its thickness, from this counter-sight that conduces its transgressor act towards where the space – until then – begins to exist.

What is built inside the gallery is, paradoxically, the fiction of a construction, the convergence of forces, isolated in the endlessness.  It is a scene, but also the edge that limits and make possible the existence of that other side that we do not need to see but rather sense. If we call proximity to this level where things happen, the events of the journey may be then placed as remoteness. If we call the visions that compete as findings, the installations may be called mysteries. If we categorize every intertextual relation of the exhibition, we enable every image to be transformation, a mirror. To the language of fiction, in Foucault’s words, it is required a symmetrical conversion. The language must stop being the power that relentlessly produces and makes images shine, and become, on the contrary, the power that unleashes them. On the other hand, Artaud would classify this series of hostile actions in everyday life as the plague of which societies are victims and part, and whose hustle and bustle hides the hopeless rawness of possessing a home that is merely a transit station, for the time is quickly consumed in the work centers, the fantasy of prosperity.

As a token for false security and certainty, we raise a graphic installation of that place that is redesigned over and over again, worthlessly, because whenever slowed the meaning, death would find us. After all, perhaps this is what we call home: our imagined comfort in the world, and our imagined world, sheltered from death.

Fernando Carabajal

mapa-suelo-paisaje. Irene Grau, Daniela Libertad y Clara Montoya.

Closing its 2018-2019 season, NF/ NIEVES FERNÁNDEZ presents mapa-suelo-paisaje, an exhibition with Irene Grau, Daniela Libertad and Clara Montoya. The set of artworks displayed behold a debate, upon multiple perspectives, on the fluidity of a territory as a concept that, in turn, establishes itself on a certain ontological stiffness.

A territory is usually associated to the idea of a space that is defined by its own limits or frontiers, and whose borders, at the same time, are defined by the sense of belonging or exclusion. Within the infinite attributions that a territory may have, it is often understood as physical or mental, geographic or imaginary, even idealized or unattainable, emerging from a psychological, political, social or cultural origin, within a collective or individual identity with a public or private nature. The territory itself is both established by the inflexibility of its boundaries and by the complexity of elements that define and compose it. Whereas it is the space one claims for oneself or imposes to others, gathering or segregating, or the land we decide to settle or even the mental zone we attribute a purpose, there seems to be a territory for each and every one.

This proposition assumes, therefore, the need to reunite a group of artworks that could travel over, delineate or erase these frontiers, browsing the limits of the exhibition space and opening a dialogue towards the free movement among artists, gallery and public.

In this sense, the works by Irene Grau, Daniela Libertad and Clara Montoya expand on different meanings and interpretations to the proposed idea and, using a diverse set of media and techniques, deepen the debate towards the understanding of the social constructions that underlie a wide landscape of relations.

Irene Grau (Valencia, 1986) presents ‘on what is left’, a project developed throughout one and a half years of strolling in the forests of Tourón, Galicia, devastated by the fires of October 2017. Starting from the desolation scenery resulting from the human actions that speculate with the land, the native woods and the production of timber, Irene aims to portray the reduction of the landscape in a pictorial form.

For that, she uses solely the ashes collected during this period and transfers them into canvases that methodologically respond to the idea of what is left. This produces a set of organic monochromes that, conceptually and formally, translate the relations between the men and their surroundings and, likewise, between the artist and a creative process marked by investigation and spatial action, by means of performative elements in its conception and execution.

All these paintings laying vertically on the ground connect, in parallel, with the flatness of the ground, the place where the ashes are deposited and, at the same time, with the structural verticality of the woodlands, now reduced to its remains. The painting is therefore what is left, not only from the forest but also from the pictorial process itself, in a constant material reduction that wears out the surface and drives it to something on the edge of being nothing. This is a gesture that, ultimately, rethinks the territories whereby the artworks are conceived, opening the possibilities of the public to connect, to contemplate and to question both the social and political processes and the artistic actions.

Clara Montoya (Madrid, 1974) is interested in the possibility to find a sensitivity in which a territory can be detached of a property notion. By questioning the processes of territorial demarcation defined as boundary between what is ‘mine’ or ‘yours’, the artist indicates an opportunity in which spaces belong to no one, away from the possessions and claims, in a state of just being by their own means. In this sense, the conquest and the control of a place, of the Earth or a landscape oppose to the idea that a land can be absolutely, revolutionarily and savagely free.

The group of works presented in the exhibition aim to relate the concept of territory with its most critical element, the matter. Working with essential elements, such as stones and metals, Clara Montoya revisits the liberation of territories and land through visual metonymies that confront the matter with its own notches by time, natural processes and the artist’s intervention.

The works by Daniela Libertad (Mexico City, 1983) strain the notions of territory with a delicate perception, both intangible and ordinary. The use of different media allows the artist to confront immaterial elements and geometrical forms with mundane objects and the actual body of the artist. This leads to exploring not only the mystical and ethereal characters of such components, but also of concrete aspects such as weight, density and touch. In those exercises of tension, the artist invigorates the mixture of apparently opposing fields, between the physical and the mental or the abstract and the figurative towards a precarious balance among the parts that, eventually, informs us on the fragile and ordinary condition of our own awareness of a day-to-day poetry.

Los límites del vacío. Jordi Teixidor y John Castles.

‘For him to whom emptiness is clear, Everything becomes clear.’

(Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 69).

The idea of void as a field without form that at the same time is the source of all creation and is inseparably linked to all forms of creation is difficult to understand, and is a question that has arisen since ancient times and that both Oriental and Western civilizations have devoted themselves to analyzing.

Conceptually void is defined as ‘lack of content’ or as ‘non-existence, nullity’, while spatially it gains a different meaning than its dictionary definitions. Void in space is a ‘place’ incorporating activity. Therefore, this void created in form based on space indeed creates a ‘place’. Or from a different perspective, void itself shapes the form and this form shaped by void creates the space.

The conceptual phenomena that the void undertakes go well beyond formal classifications. Therefore, ‘void, space and form’ will incorporate such concepts as existence – non-existence, interior – exterior, place – placeless, conflicting – contradicting each other. For centuries philosophers have reflected on this, and artists have strived to create voids in space, and to do so they have relied on physical, environmental, conceptual and semantic factors among others.

In the twentieth century visual artists have faced the void as an intellectual exercise and as another spatial entity to work on, and a legion of great figures such as Kazimir Malévich, Alexander Calder, Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana, Eduardo Chillida and Barnett Newman amongst others pondered and investigated it.

For decades the Spanish painter Jordi Teixidor and the Colombian sculptor John Castles have continued with this exploration, from two distant countries and clearly using different mediums, as well as distinct approaches; both artists have shared a deep and enriching reasoning about empty elements and through their artworks are investigating the extended fields, the monumentality of the volume and the expansion of spaces.

The exhibition John Castles and Jordi Teixidor: the limits of the void  is therefore a suggestive proposal, which is at the same time anthological and thematic and that relates two different corpus of work that, when coinciding in the rooms of NF/NIEVES FERNANDEZ and NUEVEOCHENTA following the same conceptual coordinates, is revealing because it shows that two artists – despite their remoteness and lack of contact until a few months ago – converge in the investigation of the idea of the limit as a basis to conceive, approach and work on the void.

Jordi Teixidor was born in Valencia, Spain in 1941, studied Fine Arts and devoted himself to exploring chromatic uniformity and abstract painting since the beginning of his career in the sixties. His works are aesthetically reductionist and of a limited chromatic range (with a marked predilection for black in recent years). The artist avoids the spectacle and emotion, and rather aspires that the viewer enters a meditative contemplation where she/he questions and expands the limits of her/his perception.

John Castles was born in Barranquilla, Colombia in 1946, studied architecture but left this studies to devote himself to sculpture. From the beginning he dedicated himself to abstraction, always using construction materials but showing favoritism for iron, his works intend to unfold the form and the matter; he first achieved this with more geometric and rigid pieces, which over the years changed onto more flexible and undulating works. Castles always challenges the gravitational field, explores the presence of the void and seeks to transform the interior space of each work and the area that surrounds it.

In the work of John Castles and Jordi Teixidor you can talk about coincidences and points of contact: both tend to a simple execution, to the reductionism of forms and bring to their maximum expression the simplest elements. The two artists seek to order proportions, present a concern for balance and demonstrate a marked interest in architecture – which is denoted in the investigation of physical reality and in the emphasis on spatial effects. The exhibited works of Teixidor and Castles coincide in the investigation of volumes, the examination of the presence and above all the search for another reality. Teixidor and Castles demonstrate that they have managed to challenge the ‘limits’ of the vacuum by revealing the capacity of the artwork to generate spaces and create places.

Curator: Isabela Villanueva