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.
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".