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.