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 and 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 and 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
Colectiva Colectiva
NF/ NIEVES FERNÁNDEZ presents the exhibition ‘Colectiva Colectiva’, with artworks from the gallery’s archives under a collective and public curatorial selection, during the first two weeks of January and through the gallery’s Instagram profile.
The guidelines for the project consisted in a series of introduction questions, followed by the possibility to choose between two selected artworks from the gallery’s collection.
The result is the group of artworks with the best votes by the followers, in an effort to democratize the exhibition space and involve the public with the contents shown, gathering artworks by renowned artists.
Alfonso Albacete (Antequera, Málaga, 1950), his work is usually located in the intersection between abstract and figurative art, departing from a strong color scheme in the record of memories of moments, places and experienced sensations.
Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, 1923-2012), considered one of the maximum exponents of Informalism in the world, he is one of the most distinguished Spanish artists in the 20th century.
Equipo Crónica (1694-1981), was an artistic group founded by Manolo Valdés (1942) and Rafael Solbes (1940-1981). Their production is related to the last period of Francoism and the beginning of the democratic transition.
José Luis Alexanco (Madrid, 1942), is part of the generation of artists that succeeded El Paso and Grupo Hondo, that dominated the Spanish avant-gard from mid-1960’s.
José Manuel Broto (Zaragoza, 1949), the Neo-figurative art practiced by this artist is influenced by the proposal of the French group, Suport(s)-Surface(s). In his works there prevail balances and strains between colors and shapes.
Manuel Quejido (Seville, 1946), considered on the most prominent artists of a generation that, in the mid-1970’s, advocated for figurative art.
Xavier Grau (Barcelona, 1951), his works claim the pictorial practice from an abstract background, keeping an internal strain between color and drawing, without reducing neither the liveliness of color nor the movement of its surfaces in a rhythmical formal structure.
Mauro Giaconi. Tiene un destino de nube
MAURO GIACONI (Argentina, 1977)
NF/ NIEVES FERNÁNDEZ presents Mauro Giaconi’s, (Argentina, 1977, lives and works in Mexico) first solo exhibition in Spain.
‘Tiene un destino de nube’ [Has the fate of a cloud], whose title detaches from a song by the Uruguayan singer-songwriter Alfredo Zitarrosa, ‘El corazón de mi pueblo’ [My people’s heart], is an exhibition that explores Giaconi’s most recent works, a production that includes an extensive series of drawings on second-hand book pages, and an installation made with the rests of a building located at a corner of Chimalpopoca and Bolivar’s streets in Mexico City, one block away from the artist’s studio, prior to the latest earthquake that shook the city on September 19th, 2017.
In this exhibition, the works of Giaconi explore and reflect on the tensions between memory, deceit, territory, fragility, and appearance, manipulating and transforming objects in an effort to multiply their meanings and generate polysemic images. These images, in turn, are to be completed by the public, through their bodies, their experiences and their own decisions. In this sense, the audience will have the opportunity to transform, by chance or fate, the experiences and landscapes of the exhibition.
The ruins of the building that collapsed during the earthquake are a starting point for Giaconi, who intervenes this rubble and mixes it with other debris found in Madrid. This action proposes a confusion between reality and fiction, and memory and deceit. The rubble with no historical burden is ordinary, recovered from random constructions, whereas the one intervened by the artist has a powerful narrative related to the natural disaster and the negligence of a corrupt system that, ultimately, culminated in the death of dozens of migrant women who previously lived there, undocumented and exploited by trafficking.
In another dual operation, Giaconi presents artworks in which he decomposes books sold by their weight, rather than their contents. These books are no longer information container, but recycling or decoration material. The artist dismantles these objects, subverts their contents, rearranges them without hierarchy and intervenes them using graphite, pigments and eraser. The result of this creative process is a formal cloud that plays with the margins of the book pages and alters the perception of theses ordinary objects.
Mauro Giaconi has had solo exhibitions at BMocA (Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art), MAMBA (Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires), Museo Universitario del Chopo, and group shows at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, Centro Cultural Recoleta and Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. His works are included among collections such as: SPACE Collection, OMI International School of Art, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, in the USA, and Colección Jumex, in Mexico. Furthermore, Giaconi has been awarded with several prizes, such as: Phillips Prize for Young Talents, within the Argentina and Latin America’s rounds, Painting Salon UADE, Argentina’s National Drawing Salon, and ArteBA–Petrobrás Prize in Argentina.