_{The nude does not simply represent the body, but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience}

_{Kenneth Clark (1956)}

Templo-Pladur generates a parallel between the idea of ​​immortality present in the nudes of the Greek gods with that of the exhibition spaces in the sense that places are designed where the pieces seem to be presented for eternity.

Constant and ancestral has been the relation between architecture and the human body.

In ancient Athens, a harmony between flesh and stone seemed to reign, not only the arrangement of temples and cities obeyed the way in which the Greeks conceived the human body, but they had turned nudity into an object of admiration.

The human figures in the Parthenon’s frieze show the nakedness of perfect young bodies in an unearthly way, thus alluding to an immortal reality. This visual experience that dignifies and heroizes is similar to that described by Brian O'Doherty in his essay Inside the White Cube: The ideology of the gallery space in which he interprets the space of modern galleries as a place built with the aim of generating the viewer the feeling of being outside of time, or beyond it. As if the work already belonged to posterity, or was in limbo.

The title of the project refers to the sacred building, but also mentions the construction material currently used for the cladding of ceilings and walls with the intention not only of generating a temporary mismatch, but also of putting in contact the idea of ​​architectural undressing or dressing the gallery walls. The naked exhibition space is as perfect as the body of the Greek gods, the arranged works seem as eternal as the hard flesh of the sculptures that dress and cover the architecture of the place.

Templo-Pladur brings together the architecture of the art galleries and the nudes of the Greek gods, so unreal and impossible that they seem dressed in stony flesh, through the act of dressing the space with works of art.

Templo-Pladur is the fourth edition of Interludios, a set of short-term exhibitions at NF/ NIEVES FERNÁNDEZ, whose proposal is to create a visibility space for projects thought by the artists, whether or not represented by the gallery, and which until then have not have been possible.

Clara Sánchez Sala (Alicante, 1987) has a degree in Fine Arts from the UCLM, Cuenca; a Masters’ degree in Photoespaña Theory of Photography and Artistic Projects from the UEM, Madrid and a Masters in Research in Art and Creation from the UCM, Madrid. She has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions, among which at the Fundación Juan March: Museo de Arte Abstracto, Cuenca; Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid; Fundación Marso, Mexico City, Mexico; Museu Nacional Soares Dos Reis, Porto; Fundación Otazu, Pamplona; La Laboral, Gijón; EACC, Castellón and Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid. Her works belongs to collections such as DKV, CA2M and Fundación Otazu, among others.

NF/ NIEVES FERNÁNDEZ presents the exhibition “Chicxulub, studies in a landscape”, by Fritzia Irízar. The artist investigates the Chicxulub crater in Yucatán, to establish a link between the impact of a meteorite 66 million years ago with the SARS Cov 2 pandemic.

Analyzing history and disappearance of the weakest species, Fritzia Irízar reflects on the use of power and the specific circumstances in which it dictates on the collective natural environment based on economic benefit, generating situations in which ethics and respect for community life loses all its value.

Fritzia Irizar has exhibited in several international institutions such as the MUAC, Museo Ex Teresa Arte Actual, Sala Siqueiros and Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City, the Orange County Museum of Art in Santa Ana, CA2M (Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo) in Madrid, Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco, CIFO Fundación Fontanals Cisneros in Miami, Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice, Seattle Art Museum in Seattle, Fundación Banco Santander in Madrid, Beirut Museum of Art (BeMA) in Beirut and the Rashid Karami International Fair in Tripoli. She has also participated in different biennials: the 9th and 10th Mercosur Biennial in Porto Alegre, the 12th FEMSA Biennial in Monterrey and the 14th Cuenca Biennial. 
Her work can be found in collections such as JUMEX, Mexico; Isabel y Agustín Coppel Collection, Mexico; Servais Collection, Belgium; Colección Olor Visual, Spain; Braddock Collection, USA; Proyecto Bachué, Colombia; CIFO Collection, USA; Fondazione Benetton, Italy; and CA2M, Spain.

66 million years ago on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, a meteorite struck the earth. This phenomenon led to the extinction of the species that reigned on earth and determined the beginning of a new order in the life of the planet. Few times, beyond fiction, has life suffered a global attack like the one we all live this year, a specific and direct attack on our species, selective and almost with the design of a macabre experiment that has already changed us all.

There is no doubt that in order to understand our present and to be able to imagine our future, it is essential to study our past, even the most distant of which there is only a record between rocks or under the sea, as is the case of the Chicxulub crater.

Looking for clues in the most catastrophic past of our planet, I reached the center of the Chicxulub crater in Yucatán, wishing to allow myself to think about a possible future, armed with simple observation instruments, searching for clues, but at the same time transforming a magnifying glass into a sphere of divination. The crater at first glance is only a landscape, one marine and the other jungle, but in a context like that of the pandemic we are living in, it is an oracle. 66 million years ago the strongest and largest species perished, today the attack is for the weak, but not the weak by force of nature, the weak victims of the systems, victims of massive poisoning for money or food productivity, victims from their circumstances from which it is almost impossible to escape.

The landscape as a living entity suffers from the control exercised by groups in an authoritarian position, something like what Foucault names as pastoral power, referring to the shepherd, the guide of the sheep, who has control of where and where to go. Well, the French philosopher makes a comparison of that power exercised by the church and sentences contemporary life with the idea that this same authoritarian control has been prolonged in the modern state.

This project mainly questions that use of pastoral power exercised by the state and privileged groups over the rest of the inhabitants, but especially portrays specific circumstances in which this power dictates and decides on the collective natural environment, making use of tools of control such as economic to obtain immediate benefits, particular situations where ethics and respect for community life and the future of it lose all its value, leaving all decisions to economic or political criteria, the true pastors of our times.

An exhibition of return to the essential, made up of drawings, installations and photographs about the landscape, its desire for confinement, its transformation, its exploitation and its mourning.

Fritzia Irízar, 2021

LA NOCHE MÁS CORTA is a group exhibition organized by Galería Aural and NF/ NIEVES FERNÁNDEZ that emerges as a collaborative proposition, opening a dialogue between artists from both galleries around the idea of ​​transformation in creative and artistic processes. As an effort to stimulate new forms of art production and display, the exhibition is carried out in a transversal and concomitant way between the three locations of the galleries in Madrid and Alicante with works arranged organically among them, taking conceptual and aesthetic criteria first instead of galleries’ representation, as a real exercise of institutional synergy.

With a selection of works by Alexej Meschtschanow, Fernando Sinaga, Jordi Teixidor, José Luis Landet, José Maldonado, Judith Egger, Máximo González, Pipo Hernández Rivero, Tamara Arroyo and Urs Lüthi, LA NOCHE MÁS CORTA explores transformation as a process of resignification that promotes regeneration, transmutation, change and renewal, considering the current difficult times and in reference to the traditions of San Juan, when the old and obsolete are burned to give way to the new, renewed and transformed.

In this sense, the artworks presented respond to the proposal by having undergone some transformation or by representing it conceptually both voluntarily and involuntarily, that is, works that have been started and then left for a while, until they were reconfigured for conclusion; works that are the appropriations of other objects, transformed into something else; or works that represent the displacement of the nature of something or the change in its initial idea, sense or meaning.

Alcaraz’s discourse stems from the classical tradition of painting and sculpture, arriving to a reflection on volume, language and time through the use of materials, such as water, glass, mirrors, reflections, or books that include this idea.

In his artistic language the visual transgression predominates, a playful dynamic among many different gazes and the combination of transparencies and holes that allow a glimpse of hidden, magical spaces. Thus Jordi Alcaraz establishes, through his works, an unprecedented, surprising and metaphorical relationship with the world.

Sculptures, paintings and drawings, always through his peculiar treatment of materials, and his poetic word games and unexpected titles. Sets of pigment bags that sink into glass surfaces, poetically showing the beginning of the painting, wooden sculptures that pierce the acrylic urn in which they are in, passing from the darkness of the night to the light of day, colors that flee from their cans through imaginary holes, impossible portraits.

Due to his obsession with the craft of art, in his works he delves into the almost obsessive exploration of the artist’s work: drawing, sculpting, painting ..., focusing rather in the exercise of doing, than in the works as the completion of an action. As a result, absence seems to be more relevant than evidence in the works. The absence of almost everything, and the utmost importance to the disappearance of the work, with the permanence of the action. What matters is the sensation of drawing, what is there at the precise moment before doing it, the impression at the end, but not the work itself, not the resulting drawing. There is no image or reference to any idea, the artist draws but there is no drawing left. We can see the space that has been left, the trace of the material used, but the absence of anything else is almost absolute.

Jordi Alcaraz breaks the material in different ways, everything is less evocative and more poignant. Layers of materials are superimposed as protective shields, and they build diverse and more complex layers of meaning. 

His works can be found in collections such as Biedermann Museum, Donaueschingen (Germany), Colección Fontanal Cisneros, Miami; Williams Collection, Massachusetts; Olor Visual, Barcelona; or Fundación Banco Sabadell.