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Entrecejo

Omar Barquet
Mauro Giaconi
José Luis Landét

Entrecejo is a project specifically created for Madrid by Omar Barquet, Mauro Giaconi and José Luis Landét whom, since 2007, have met in several occasions to play and break up with their individual practice, whether to make a work as a group whether to develop curatorial practices. Approaching issues as culture, politics and history, each artist creates, from his individual work and place of action (between Ciudad de Mexico and Buenos Aires) strategies of discussion that question his own references, and dissolve the idea of individual and authorship through collaboration. Be it by creating a practice built through their personal works, or by thinking projects built and resolved in a group, there is a permanent interest in questioning the role of the spectator, and rethinking about voluntary and involuntary participation.

Reconsidering how to arouse a discussion about our circumstances, and approaching game as a conflict, Entrecejo responds to the need to reactivate dialogue in the collaborative and personal work of these three artists.

The exhibition is divided in two parts: the first one is a group show with recent works by the three artists that reflect about the fractures, traces and tracks of a recent historical landscape. Works that sound and are thought as exercises around memory. The second part suggests an experience activated by the visitors. It is a recreation of a popular game in Mexico, usually played at the “pulquerías” and construction sites, where a bet is made by throwing a coin to a board where a hole has been made. In the gallery the sound of the coins on the wood is registered and amplified, transforming the character of the space. The game amplified, invades the space and changes the landscape, which appears as a latent risk.

Multidisciplinary artist, Omar Barquet, Mexico 1979, has developed a method of research which proposes various possibilities of perception and interaction between space, time, landscape, sound and memory. These concepts serve as a flexible base where he articulates different projects exploring diverse processes and means of representation
He has exhibited at institutions as Mandragoras Art Space, New York; Museo Experimental El Eco, México; Kunsthalle, Sao Paulo or the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Mérida, as well as participated in group exhibitions at the Museo Rufino Tamayo, or Casa del Lago. His work can be seen in the collections of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, JUMEX, México, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Joan Hickey Collection, New York. SPACE Collection, Los Angeles, etc.

The work of Mauro Giaconi, Argentina 1977, takes place mainly in the field of drawing, starting point to generate spatial interventions and imagery that mo-ves across the aesthetics of chaos and procedural investigation. Architecture, structure, memory and environment are all key elements in the artist’s practice, which focuses on proposing experiences that build tension between opposite concepts like construction and destruction; birth and death; confinement and freedom; depth and surface; dream and awakening. His work has been exhibited in international institutions such as the Fine Arts Palace Museum, Carrillo Gil Art Museum in Mexico, Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art etc. His body of work is part of collections such as the SPACE Collection, USA; Bue-nos Aires Museum of Modern Art, Argentina; Miami Art Museum, Jumex Collec-tion in Mexico, Bernis Center for Contemporary art in USA among others.

The work of Jose Luis Landet, Argentina 1977, conceived by the artist as the place where different ways of occur convey and absorb cultural processes cros-sed by social, political and ideological actions, investigate about the traces or social and cultural dregs. Through the recovery of romantic landscapes realized by amateur painters, photographs, postcards, magazines and other materials full of memory, time and use, the artist works in a material and conceptual de-construction questioning the boundaries between public and private, universal history, the utopian past and dystopian present. Jose Luis Landet has participated in exhibitions at Maison Rouge, Paris, Mu-seo de Arte Moderno, Oaxaca, Museo de Arte Moderno, Juárez or Rozemblum Foundation in Florence. Asimismo el Museo de Arte de la Ciudad de México le dedico una muestra individual en 2011.His work is part of collections as Colección Jumex, México. Lousiana Museum, Denmark. Sayago & Pardon, EEUU. MACO, Mexico, The Brillembourg Capriles Collection, EEUU / España / Venezuela. JoAnn Hickey Collection, EEUU. Marc Van Den Henden Collection, Belgium.

Jordi Alcaraz. Dibuixos de defensa

The work of Jordi Alcaraz departs from the classical tradition of painting and sculpture to reach a consideration about volumen, language and time through the use of materials such as glass, mirrors, books or the reflection of the light.

In his language visual transgression prevails, there is a play between different looks and the conjuntion of transparencies and holes, wich allow us to glimpse hidden spaces. He builds through his works an unknown, surprising and metaphorical relationship with the world. Sculptures, paintings and drawings always through his way of treating materials and the poetic and unexpected games of words and titles.

Always working around the profession of art, in his last works he goes in depth in the exploration of the work of the artista: drawing, sculpting or painting…focussing in the action of doing it rather that in the work itself as a result of this exercise.

As a result, a body of work in wich absence is more important. Absence of almost all the elements, The disappearance of the work as the theme. Presence of the action. What is important is the feeling of drawing, what there is in the last moment before doing it, the impression upon finishing, but not the result, not the work, not the final drawing.

There is no image nor reference to any idea, the artista draws but there is no drawing after. We can see the space left, the footprints of the material used, but the absence of any other element is almost complete.

In Dibuixos de defensa, Jordi Alcaraz breaks up the material in different ways. Everything becomes less evocative and sharper. Layers of materials overlap as defense shields ad build more and more complex meanings.

Jordi Alcaraz, Calella, 1963, began his working in sculpture and engraving. Hi exhibits in galleries in Madrid, Barcelona, Cologne, Los Angeles, Berlin, Trieste and Zürich. He has also exhibited in institutions such as Sala Tecla, Fundación Telefónica, Los Angeles Art Museum, Musee Rattu or Boghossian Foundation.

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.

Arnulf Rainer. Farbenfest

Interested in the automatism Arnulf Rainer he started very soon to base his expressivity in the act of hiding existing images getting closer to abstraction, and to the total concealment of forms.Always emphasizing the human act of painting and the body language that painting involves, Rainer praises the first forms of human expression, using the hands to extend the painting, and with unconsciousness as a creative goal.

In the 70’s he starts to take photographs of himself. Creating a link between the theatrical and the graphic as a media of expression he gets closer to the Viennese Actionism and exploring body language through performance he expands his practice to video.

In the last series of work presented at the gallery within these videos, painting stops being closer to monochrome to show brighter colors in different layers, more transparent and free. In Beautiful Ladies, the artist goes back to the faces, one of his main themes, with the intention to touch preexistent images and emphasize them.

Sign of the obsession of the artist to be free of his own limitations, his paintings show his search of the maximum expressivity trough colors, textures and gestures. Even the format of some canvases exceeds the conventional limits and adopts the form of the Latin cross.

From the exaltation to the resignation, from the conventional image or the photographic one distorted, to the absence of images, each series of works by Arnulf Rainer is different, but they all share the wish to destroy the conventional communication to recover the richness of the human expression.

Jus Juchtmans. Undertow

Known for his apparently monochrome paintings, and clearly related with minimal art, that rejected the dominance of visual perception and presented the idea of artworks as objects to be experienced, to be made aware of, and no longer to be seen for their visual impact, Jus Juchtmans works with a translucent painting that he applies to the canvas in different consecutive layers, not necessarily of the same color.

Sometimes there are even thirty different layers, and in this way, colors that we haven´t perceived at first sight appear under the apparently dominant color.

The result is an extremely shiny surface that resists the viewer, and looking at them is often a frustrating process that makes the spectator to feel uneasy. This reflection as well as the reflection of the gallery’s surroundings, is an integral part of the work. He wants the spectator to become conscious of the viewing conditions of his work, particularly the transitory and time specific nature of those conditions.

Born in Morstel in 1952, Jus Juchtmans studied Fine Arts and Design in Antwerp, where he has developed his artistic career from the beginning.

Since then, he has grown up to become a well-known artist, participating in different group shows in museums and institutions, among other ones the Ludwig Museum, with Callum Innes and Nicola Rae, the Kunsthalle of Recklinghaussen, and Budapest, the Kunstmuseum Celle, etc.

In the late years he has reinforced his career with individual shows in London, Munich, Cologne, Graz, Berlin, Paris and New York.

His works can be found in museums like the SMAK of Gante, The Contemporary Art museum of San Diego, the PMMPK of Belgium, the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum of Hagen… and in collections like the Peter Stuyvesant Collection of Amsterdam, Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles and F. van Lanschot Bankiers.

Green Go Home

The story of “Green Go Home” is part myth and part folklore, partially a misunderstanding, and, to some degree, an invention of the imagination.

The term gringo -commonly used in Latin America to describe a Western foreigner- has been assumed by many to have etymologically originated with the phrase “Green go home!”

One story holds that during the Mexican-American War, American troops uniform frequently included green coats. Hence “Green go home!” Detractors of the green coat theory have pointed out that U.S. troops wore blue during the Mexican Invasion.

There are, however, alternative explanations. One earlier instance of the use of gringo can be dated to a 1786 Castilian dictionary by Terreros y Pando in which the term was used to describe foreigners whose particular accents prevented them from pronouncing Castilian properly. Moreover, in Madrid especially, the word was used to describe a person of Irish descent.

In 1846, Roman Catholic Americans and immigrants from Ireland and Germany were sent by the U.S. government to participate in the Mexican-American War. The resentment over their treatment by their superiors, and a realization that they were fighting for a Protestant nation, led many to switch sides. The song that they frequently sang, “Green Grow the Rushes, O,” serves as another potential origin to the term gringo.

In Brazil, gringo is also thought to have been derived from the English words green and go, but rather than originating from military interaction, this term came about from foreigners’ exploitation of nature.

For their project at Untitled, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Tomas Vu will cover the walls with altered images of the North American press, over which Tiravanija will make a graffiti and display the works made with the Spanish and American press and as the starting point by the two of them.

The provocation inherent in “Green Go Home,” is positioned against the subtle underlying subtext of U.S. interventions, and colonialist attitudes, towards its neighbors in Latin American from Mexico southwards: an antagonism that has cost many lives and much strife. In the imagery itself, the presence of each character—from films to music to personalities of resistance—reveals itself to the viewer as addressing the condition of the graffiti text. The grid holds up the statement and reinforces the layers of interpretation, readings, and misunderstandings. “Green Go Home” is meant to be a wall of resisters, and of resistance.

Tomas Vu (Saigon), professor at Columbia University since 1996, and founder and artistic director of the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies. He has overseen collaboration and publication of projects with artists such as Kiki Smith, Sarah Sze, William Kentridge, Jasper Johns, Kara Walker as well as his own work exhibiting in galleries of Paris, Bogota, New York, Beijing…His most important series include the Opium Dreams where Vu shows us a modern day vision of Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” 2006 – 2012 Flatland, a serie of 103 pieces rooted in the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.

Rirkrit Tiravanija (1961,Buenos Aires) is widely recognized as one of the most influential artists of his generation. His practice defies media-based description combining traditional object making, public and private performances, teaching, and other forms of public service and social action. He has had shows at the MOMA, NY, in 1996, the LACMA in Los Angeles in 1999, the Musee d’art Moderne de La Ville de Paris (2005), the Reina Sofia in Spain in 1994, or the Guggenheim in NYC.

He has also participated at the Sao Paolo Biennale, Whitney Biennial, and Venice biennale in several ocassions.

He is a teacher at Columbia Univeristy and a founder and curator of Utopia Station, a collective project of artists, historians and currators. He is president of the educational and ecological project The Land Foundation.

NO PLACE

Marcela Armas
Milena Bonilla
Gianfranco Foschino
Fritzia Irizar

“Be realistic, demand the impossible!” as the May ’68 slogan went. But pushed further this idea of impossible thinking can become practical. The problem with Utopia, as the horrific social twentieth-century experiments of Nazism and totalitarian Communism demonstrated, is that dreams start to be taken for realities. Once this happens, there is a tendency to brutalize the present in order to bring it into line with an imagined future. But what if we imagine Utopia as only a dream?This is what Thomas More does in his Utopia: he sketches a picture of an attractive and compelling world for us to lose ourselves within. We live in it, we experience it. And then, he takes it away from us by calling it “no-place.” Because a dream is just a dream, this fantasy of the future cannot be sold to us as a place in which we can, and thus must resideThis Utopia in its true meaning of no-place, still retains its political function as an ideal: a loadstone to guide us and a frame within which to imagineThe idea of this exhibition arises from the necessity of a utopian thinking to modify progressive politics. Without the utopian thinking we are tied by the tyranny of the possible, and realistic thinking is no longer the appropriate answer to nowadays situation.

During years, the politic and social critics have been developed from a realistic point of view. Reality was shown to the spectator to make him react to the hard evidence of a series of injustices, or duels.

Now, in a time when we live over exposed to images, immersed in a visual culture that doesn’t skimp on details, show reality is no longer efficient.

It is because of that that we need a reversed attitude. From a creative point of view, that doesn´t have to adapt itself to reality, political critic or activism can be even more efficient or transgressive. Today’s political problem is not a lack of analysis, or revealing truth, but the radical necessity of imagination.

Milena Bonilla, “An Enchanted Forest”
2013 – 2014
Two books mention the existence of an Enchanted Forest in the area that is covering the former Bohemian Forest, which has been divided between the Bavarian and Šumava Natural Parks. The parks belong to Germany and the Czech Republic correspondingly. The first book narrates and analyzes a discovery made by a group of scientists between 2002 and 2011. They start to notice, while they were tracking Red Deer population as a control routine, that Red Deer females from both countries are not crossing the former Iron Curtain border, even though the fence has been removed since 1989.

The second book is narrating, under the same title, the story of an anarchist group called Ahornia whose members used to gather in the same forest area. The book is a compilation of a series of statements that the secret group wrote in 1967, one year before 1968’s Prague Spring.

“In the mood for love, or how to move a criminal”, 2014, is a photograph showing a floral arrangement, mainly of tulips. Looks like a beautiful present, but actually it was made to transport cocaine plants needed for an installation through Europe, from Amsterdam to Paris, and Spain.

Marcela Armas, “Exhaust and Obstruction”, 2009, with two-stroke engine are part of a project intended to examine the relationship of using energetics of fossil origin to conform urban space from the presence of combustion residuals in the environment, and which are left as a disperse memory of the urban activity.
The project is based on a variety of plastic wrappings with various forms and capacities. Such wraps act as containers of gaseous residuals expelled through the exhaust of several internal combustion vehicles that are running. The work outstands the close and reciprocal relationship between those machines and the city from their potential to visualize contaminants that occupy a place on the space.

“Incandescent Nights”, 2008, is a work that refers to geographic locations with light pollution and high heat emissions, which correspond to human settlements in the context of an important debate on global warming. A meditation on the city, made visible by its power consumption, the piece explores urban morphologies. Observed at the distance, cities on the earth’s surface resemble functional systems such as live organisms and galaxies. Paradoxically confronting the beauty of a city’s prosperous condition with its destructive nature.

Fritzia Irizar Untitled (Illusion and Disappointment II) After collecting discarded instant lottery tickets, , a graphologist interpreted the marks—left on the stubs when the buyer scraped the removable strip—in order to analyze the personalities of the people who scratched and threw away the tickets. The interpretations are presented as audio clips accompanying a series of digital prints that correspond to the marks on each lottery ticket. The extracted marks of the piece Untitled (Illusion and Disappointment I), 2011 were transferred onto gold sheets to capture, through a material of great monetary value, the disappointment of people.

“Untitled. How to perfume the Danube with 100ml. of roses’ water”, 2013

To perfume the Danube with 100 ml. of roses’ water is, in itself, a utopia. Even this, the viewer can see the action, listen to the river, and smell the roses’ water, imagining the Danube perfumed. So, it is true that we can perfume the Danube with 100ml of water roses’. “The piece requires of the spectator to be finished, and the willingness of the spectator to imagine. Is an act of faith. In some way, everything works like this. When we read a news, or we see a work of art, it is us who believe in it, and turn it real”

Gianfranco Foschino Monolith Controversies, 2014, presented in the Chilean Pavillion of the Architecture Biennale of Venice, is a project about the concrete wall panels produced by the Chilean KPD plant and Donated in 1971 by the Soviet Union to support president Salvador Allende’s Democratic Road to Socialism. Producing prefabricated housing components, this panel has since been the subject of several polit­ical and ideological controversies. Allende himself signed the wet concrete, only for his gesture to be lat­er covered over by Augusto Pinochet, who hid it be­neath a representation of the Virgin and Child framed by two colonial lamp fixtures. Gianfranco Foschino has been researching the houses in Chile built with that concrete panel, and how these facades reflect todays living in Chile.

Moris. NADIE TE EXTRAÑARÁ EN LA MANADA

Nobody will miss you at the pack corresponds to the empty place someone leaves after passing away, and without belonging to anyone, it is not occupied, and belonging to all, it makes possible an upcoming death.

The shift from nothingness to something affects the compound in a way that every single individual is a possible victim of a catastrophe.

That shore between everything and nothing, again and again, in such fluctuation, appears, directing the flow of the events from the inside to the outside, the pack compact the death while drawing life, and the space frames that vitality and untack death in multiple strings.

The city of Mexico, with 22 million of inhabitants is traced with new tools, silent languages whose signs brace the new figure where time and city are re signified in the present, the gesture, the act, the knowledge. However, the experience doesn’t transcend and each day alters the recovery and the fact: the uncertainty of each part breaks up the possible progress, the half-truths never resolve complex and archaic necessities. The urban bands execute activities that go from the ritual to the survival and whose links infiltrate into the family model. Moris takes this to explain himself the city and its rules, and to position himself in his surrounding from his work that is, in itself, a visual essay. If from 2004 his language transcends in the art world, his personal context, inhabiting one of the poorest neighborhoods of the suburbs of the City of Mexico, persuade him to codify that of what he inevitably takes part in and from what you have to obtain very quickly the evidence, and leave.

There is a form of collecting and taxonomy, but also a poetical game that writes with the same characters used in the Infern by Dante, and the National Geographic documentaries of the wild life.

A possible scheme of triads: Trace/ Impression/ Recuperation, Constructions/ Assemblies/Destructions; Arms/ Defense/ Offense; Brands/ Places/ Limits; Movement/ suspension/ balance, Structure the cartography over which not only the artist, but the art free itself, paradoxically, in this claustrophobic battle without bands.

The system to which you belong is that where you are anomalous and it is only one. You have to identify yourself rapidly according to the demand to collect the materials in the stolen objects markets. Your have to act and dress in a way to get the piece of cloth over which a dog’s fight leaves its track, you have to talk with who knows where and when the fight will take place, to obtain the trace of a room where drugs are consumed and sold.

You need to belong, be beast, be litter, and be.

Fernando Carabajal

Pipo Hernández. Luz de Occidente

Pipo Hernández Rivero outline questions about all kind of cultural certitude, for what he uses a binomial process, mixing both images and texts.

This unresolved dialogue promotes a critic approach from the viewer that shows that often the standardization of some discourses excludes the majority of the voices

In “Light form the West”, the artist offers us a reconsideration of the pictorial from formal and conceptual structures, part of a “broken” minimalism, and light hierarchies that act as the axes of the installations.

They are pieces where both atmospherical light and useless lamps are involved. Like in the piece that gives title to the Show “Light from the West”, in which the use of verses of national anthems stablishes a link with the structure of the off lights, a piece where the artist deny each piece its identity and its value.

In this way, the artists values the relational complexity of the possibilities of painting in the XXI st century.

Mateo Mate. La cara oculta

An stretcher on canvas instead of a canvas on a stretcher. The picture depicts a never before seen side, a never illuminated side which has always remained invisible and hidden. ¿What mysteries hides? The blind face hides a normalized and closed system in which creation is conditioned. Contemporary artists don’t suspect that their formats of creation belong to a law, already agreed by others.

According to Foucault: “The normal is stablished as a coercive principle in education with the establishment of a standardized education, with `normal ‘schools, is also established in the effort to organize a medical group and a proper hospital framework for the nation, and , finally ,it is used to standardize the products and industrial procedures. From there, the ideas of normal and abnormal, that determine a society model each day more homogenous, are born”.

This desire to standardize the whole social structure is born in France in the middle of the 19th Century. And the Fine Arts Academy of France set up a system in which, among many other things, a series of rules were imposed to regulate the measures of the canvas used by artists for each theme. The different sizes are unified under three groups, corresponding to the themes of “figure”, “landscape” or “marina”.

This system of sizes not only unified the production of the artists of the time, but also the fabrication in series of the known as the “traditional European canvases”. It is a system still current in the canvases selling in Occident. Each model of society has an art model corresponding to it.

Jordi Teixidor. Pintura

Considerado uno de los máximos representantes de la abstracción española, Jordi Teixidor (Valencia, 1941) ha expuesto en galerías de España y Europa. Ha participado en la Bienal de Venecia e instituciones como La Academia Española en Roma, Caja Burgos, o el IVAM le han dedicado muestras individuales a su trabajo.

Heredero del expresionismo abstracto de Rothko, Ad Reinhardt y Barnet Newman, del que toma el uso de líneas verticales, Teixidor es reconocido por sus pinturas casi monocromas y por el uso riguroso del color negro, que en estas ultimas obras aparece enmarcado, no con marco, potenciando esa profundadida del vacio que da el espacio desconocido.

Formatos alargados con bandas a modo de dintel enmarcan espacios vacíos de color. La forma tan matisssiana de la ventana, siempre presente en Teixidor, se convierte esta vez también en puerta. Una puerta que puede ser la del templo y que acaba relacionándose con el altar. Un espacio que hay que recorrer, pero que primero es necesario atravesar. Una metáfora más que un simbolismo.

La utilización de rojos o amarillos son la contraposición al negro y en los formatos, y los encuadres hay una clara referencia a la evocación del ritual del retablo o del icono. Son obras que precisan una aproximación pausada, reflexiva. Se trata, al fin y al cabo, de pintura, sin concesiones, y con una deliberada presencia de lo manual, que nos lo recuerde. Y la misma exigencia en la realización de la obra se requiere en su contemplación.

Su obra se puede encontrar en las colecciones del Guggenheim de Nueva York, el MNCARS en Madrid, el IVAM en Valencia, la Fundación Juan March, el Banco de España, Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, Colleccion Stuveysan en Amsterdam, el Museo Patio Herreriano, el CAAM de Las Palmas, el Museo de Arte Moderno de San Francisoc, la Fundación La Caixa, el Museo de Berkeley…, etc.