INTERLUDIO 1: Fin de partie. JORDI TEIXIDOR
Le Danse, L’atelier Rouge (1911), View of Notre Dame (1914) or Porte-fenêtre à Collioure (1914)... The works by Henri Matisse have been, for me, sometimes during very extensive periods, a clear and assumed reference that have opened path to projects that, at the same time, ended up being artworks.
In 2002, I realized the first sketch of reflection from the painting Bathers by a river (1909-1916), part of the collection at the Art Institute Chicago.
I entitled La Rivière to this journey through the works of Matisse, and it ultimately extends until 2020 and which succession is described by Mariano Navarro in the catalogue of the exhibition Los límites de la pintura, currently on view at the Centro José Guerrero in Granada.
During this long period of time, in which sketches, drawings and intentions have been accumulated, I have only made two big paintings, in 2004. However, both have been destroyed. After eighteen years, in September 2020, I conclude the series La Rivière with the painting Fin de partie.
Without discarding the allusion to the work by Samuel Beckett, author I am very fond of, the title Fin de partie is a clear reference to a chess game: when there are few pieces left on the board and everything seems lost, one has to ditch the king.
This painting is, therefore, the culmination of interests, dedication and reflections that have made possible its realization. In its contemplation there can be appreciated its intentioned lack of representation. Neither does the work allude to something out of itself, producing in its sight an uncomfortable sensation as consequence of a present absence, of the non-narrative that, in compensation, returns us the gaze to an open and new experience. Success does not rely in the end but in recognizing failure, defeat, in which limit we can expect only continuity and, hence, the artwork contains nothing, maybe time.
Jordi Teixidor. November, 2020.
Pretérito perfecto. Ângela Ferreira, Grada Kilomba y Rogelio López Cuenca.
The exhibition Pretérito Perfecto aims towards generating an encounter between the current moment and its preludes in the past.
The artists that compose the exhibition share an understanding of art as a critical tool for research: Ângela Ferreira, Grada Kilomba and Rogelio López Cuenca, from different countries and alluding to different contexts, develop artistic practices that meet and resonate among themselves, and in which they explore and reflect on several moments of History. Throughout their respective careers, these artists have worked on colonialism, states of exception, silencing and other issues structurally encrusted in our societies and, with their counter-hegemonic gaze, keep on pushing the boundaries of the established discourses. The work on memory they carry out on perceiving the past as a moment of time in constant revision, generates disruptive forms and opens to diverse formalizations that contribute to new possibilities of seeing and understanding the world today.
Hence, in this exhibition, several time layers: the reference to Spain’s recent past through the non-fictional, the reinterpretation of fouding classics of European culture or the hommage to different figures or utopian episodes of the 20th Century History in Portugal, Mozambique, Democratic Republic of the Congo and other countries.
Pretérito Perfecto [Past Perfect] is, therefore, a title charged with irony, that questions our relation with History and implies that we rely on its critical study to shed light on past episodes and its consequnces in the present.
Bruno Leitão, curator of Pretérito Perfecto
Ângela Ferreira (Maputo, 1958), her artistic practice is focused in the analisis of consequences from colonialism and postcolonialism in the contemporary world: a research scope where identity and the configuration of a modern movement play a central role in contexts subdued to a colonial past.
Grada Kilomba (Lisbon, 1968) is an interdisciplinary artist know for her work centered on the examination of memory, trauma, gender, racism and postcolonialism. Her work is realized in different formats, from texts, stage reading and acting, until videos, theatrical installations, in what she entitles 'Performing Knowledge'.
The works of Rogelio López Cuenca (Nerja, 1959) abounds on language, mass media, migration crises, historic memory and, in general, power dynamics in current society. At the exhibiton, the artworks presented are co-produced with Elo Vega (Huelva, 1965).
ONLINE GUIDED TOUR WITH THE CURATOR, BRUNO LEITÃO
PAST PERFECT TALKS: Ângela Ferreira and Bruno Leitão (in English)
PAST PERFECT TALKS: Rogelio López Cuenca y Bruno Leitão (in Spanish)
PAST PERFECT TALKS: Grada Kilomba and Bruno Leitão (in English)
VIRTUAL TOUR HERE
Arnulf Rainer. Visages
With a selection of artworks spanning from 1970 to 2002, Visages reviews the importance of faces in the work of Arnulf Rainer through three different series: his self-portraits or Face farces, the Death Masks or Totenmaskes and finally the veiled pictures or Schleierbildern, in which the artist uses as a departure point preexisting images from the history of art.
With the prominence of the Face Farces, which depict a person who can only express himself through the movements of his body, in an attempt of the artist to dissolve himself, as a metaphoric gesture of the oblivion, completely deliberated, of what art is, this exhibition gathers a series of works that insist the whole of art can find its origins in an artist. Either a naked man without any tools for the act of painting, overflowed by painting, either his gaze covering preexisting images.
The overpaintings of the Schleierbilder are the physical trace of this gaze, without the intention of adding any further meaning to the previous image, but rather remove excess meaning anchored to the image through habits and historicization of art.
Just as Cézanne, undaunted, observed his apples and his mountains, and day by day helped them to life in his painting, so too does Rainer tirelessly recounts what he observes, day by day, in art, paintings and life. Jean-Michel Foray
Tamara Arroyo. Pura calle.
Pura calle is Tamara Arroyo’s first exhibition at NF/ NIEVES FERNÁNDEZ and gathers brand new artworks with a set of previous pieces that represent her body of work throughout the last years.
This selection dialogues with the different matters approached by the artist in her work – using her life experiences as a starting point – such as her daily strolls through the city, in which she finds wastes of the processes of ‘domestication’ of the modern citizen.
In this sense, the group of selected artworks questions the consumption mechanisms of certain formalizations and objects within contemporary households, articulated by a few of the artist’s autobiographical references that, ultimately, establish a discourse on collective and individual memories.
The urban locus from where these works emerge is the landmark used by Tamara Arroyo to observe the architectural processes resulting from the social constraints in the construction of space.
The public realm, as a privileged space for everyday life, is a reservoir of identity signs and creative potential. Tamara Arroyo, hence, frictions the capabilities that both the context and the architecture have to influence their inhabitants and, through diverse formalizations, her artworks evoke these issues, distinguishing between spaces whether lived, experiential or existential, that operates unconsciously and the physical and geometrical space.
Her work emphasizes on the mental states that derive from relations with our immediate surrounding, such as belonging, integration and critique, in an effort to foster in the audience other sensations, views and interactions.