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Chiharu Shiota. Earth and blood

Chiharu Shiota, Osaka 1972, presents in this new exhibition a series of works that explores her relationship with nature, and her body. The exhibitions consist in a video installation with six works and a thread installation with a dress, sign for her of a second skin. In her work, Chiharu Shiota uses thread, broken windows, old clothes and shoes… If these objects create a disturbing feeling, they also revive memories of the past that we have been accumulating during years.

Well known for her installations with thread as main material, Chiharu makes them as symbols of what we are and the things we belong to, creating an oppressive atmosphere. Always seen at first sight, her installations locate us in a dreamful place, where we develop a certain state of anxiety.

Trying to get over a miscarriage, the artist went back to work with earth as a basic material.

“With the deadline of the exhibition I thought ‘Do I really have to make Works when I feel like this? But then the title Earth and Blood came to me and I was helplessly overcome by a torrent of sadness anger and anxiety. At the end I show some extremely dark videos and drawings. I wanted to make something that conceal my feelings but I simply couldn’t hide”.

Danica Phelps. Income’s Outcome

With her delicates pencil lines, her transparent drawings, some on top of others, and her colourful lines explaining with all detail her personal economy, Danica Phelps has been confirmed as an important artist who, with a very personal style, turns her privacy into an artistic object.

Income’s Outcome is a new project by Danica Phelps, where she keeps track of the money generated by the sale of each of her drawings. Each time a drawing is sold in the series, a window opens into her life and she draws what she spends that money on. When all the money is spent, the window closes. Each green stripe panel shows the income that was generated as well as a little cartoon of the drawing or drawings that were sold to generate that income.

In her drawings Danica Phelps portrays her routine, her family, and in her graphics her economy, her expenses and incomes, with al details of who bought one piece, or for how much was sold. Everything to keep track of her life, and her career, making clear that there would be no drawing without the collector act of buying, and to make public the details of the art world, usually wellknown for its secretism.

This use of texts, lines, and figurative drawings has been always the mechanism of her sophisticated mix between narrative and abstraction, and always using the line as a basic graphic expression.

Rafael Grassi. Ojo por Ojo

In his work, Grassi shows a sensibility to every way of formal contamination, reconciling an attachment for the pictorial matter with an illusion of perspective, or a tricky figuration, creating in this way a surface filled with contradictions and chromatic variety.

If in earlier works photographic images were an starting point for a process of abstraction and manipulation, Ojo por Ojo refers to the, not always smooth relationship between painting and photography.

For centuries painting had the hegemony of the construction of image, and its history is parallel to the history of European thought. The arrival of photography was a disturbing element as it questioned this monopoly in the building and construction of the image., it often remains captive of the use economic interests impose. Its technical development and the growth of its possibilities reduce more and more the awareness of what it photographs in benefit of its spectacularity. With time, photography has prevailed to all other possible means to construct this image but, being one of the most effective means of propaganda

Painting, instead, concentrates its interests in territories out of the reach of photography, a search which has taken it out of the field of the construction of image, activity which had been essential for centuries in its evolution.

Reacting against photography and emancipated of its duty to image, painting has showed its vitality, confirming the self-sufficiency of its means, the matter of its presence and the awareness of its production. Against the capacity of the machine, it turns to the essence of the problem; the consciousness of what we look at, of how we look at it and the language into which it translates what has been watched for a moment into something which will be visible forever.

From this argument between the photographic look and the painters look, from this plot between the thing and its image, the experience and the language, a hybrid is born. Is the final result, although not definite, of a settling of scores between photography and painting, to look and to see, the man and the machine.

Simon Patterson. Under cartel

“UnderCartel” shows a series of photographs of equestrian statues from around the world. Each statue is shown paired with another in a relation that suggests their being bartered and exchanged. The idea comes from the historical term ‘under cartel’ which was a written or verbal protocol regarding the status of exchanged prisoners of war or hostages.

Rather than people, Patterson’s proposal is for a potentially endless international programme for the transfer of equestrian statues from state to state, public square to public square. We are offered, for example, the statue of Joan of Arc from the Place des Pyramides in Paris being swapped with that of El Cid in Burgos in Spain, or George IV in Trafalgar Square with that of Napoleon Bonaparte in Boulogne-sur-Mer. In each case, the proposed exchange is illustrated by flashing neon arrows that arc above and beneath the photographs to represent the journeys these sculptures would take to find their new homes. Below this assembly is an additional photograph of an equestrian statue.

Resting on foam blocks, as though about to be hung, it figures as a potential replacement if, say, Caligula was unavailable for transfer. The choice of equestrian statues as the vehicles for this cultural exchange infers their one-time role as signifiers of national self identification– from England we see the Duke of Wellington, Charles I and George III while America favours George Washington, and Mongolia Genghis Khan – but the recommendation that they be swapped calls into question what ideological, historical, political and cultural values these public monuments still carry. Given their ubiquity, the often unremarkable artistic quality of the sculpture and the contemporary dissociation, at least in the West, from a belief in a national figurehead, the question Patterson’s work asks is: would anyone notice?

Emphasizing the outmoded nature of equestrian sculptures, the photographs themselves are presented as relics of an earlier era. Many of them are shown on their original slide mount; with their distinct aesthetic and hand-written archival information detailing the figure, sculptor, date and location of the statues, they represent a pre-digital form of historical documentation.

Under Cartel appears to make light of the like-for-like swap of cultural artefacts but the fanciful exchange of William III for Peter the Great raises questions about the nature of contemporary global politics, the extent to which the notion of a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ between countries could still exist and the status of public sculpture as a barometer of a nation’s cultural, ideological, economic and militaristic health.

Jordi Alcaraz

The discurse of Alcaraz starts from the classic tradition of painting and sculpture to get to reflect about volumen, language and time through the use of materials like water, glass, mirrors, reflections and books. In his artistic language predominates the visual transgression, the game of different sights and the play between transparencies and holes that allow seeing hidden spaces, magic places?

In this way, Jordi Alcaraz establishes, through his works, an inedited and metaphoric relationship with the world.

Sculptures, paintings and drawings, always through his personal language, his way of play with the materials, and his poetic titles.

Always obsessed with the trade of the artist, in his recent works Jordi Alcaraz explores, obsessively what means being a painter, and sculptor, focusing each time more in the exercise of producing a work of art more than in the work itself.

As a result, works in which the absence is more important than the evidence. The absence of mostly everything, and the prominence of the disappearance of the work, is the main character of these new pieces, within the permanence of the action. What matters is the sensation of drawing, what exists is the precise moment of beginning to draw, and the impression of finishing something, but not the work itself, not the drawing as a result.

There is no image or reference, no idea. The artist draws but there is no drawing left. We can see the space, the trace of the material utilized, but the absence is almost absolute. And sometimes we don’t even see the material, but only the reflection, the hole, and sometimes only smoke, or the essence of something as fragile as a cloud.