Duo 1/5: Magda Arnaud & Guillermo García Cruz

Galería Nueva presents the Project Duo, a combination of five exhibitions organized by Atelier Solar and sponsored by Madrid City Council through the programme for supporting contemporary art and national and international mobility 2019. In this first exhibition we can meet the artwork of Magna Arnaud and Guillermo García Cruz which they have been producing in the studios of Atelier Solar during the last two months.

These artists were sectioned inside the project “Curator meets artist,” a program that allows a selection of eight curators from Europe to realize virtual visits through videoconferences to the studios of more than 120 artists from Madrid, just as get closer to the exhibitions of artists without studio that we realize in Galería Nueva.

The artwork of Magda Arnaud (Buenos Aires, 1979) consists of a series of poems written by her that talk about the conflict and the doubt inside the creative process, the pleasure of the unfinished and whatever creates desire inside her. The concept of drawing and writing mix in her work, as she claims, “I write about drawing and I draw about writing”. The Argentine artists seeks to transmit in an ambiguous manner ideas, methods, and approaches that owns the person that creates them as well as the person that observes. Her investigation about the creative processes of the artists and the different disciplines, of this and other times, is manifested in her work. From her experimental lines, Arnaud selects words, phrases and punctuation signs to manipulate them sculptural granting body throughout embroidery on felt, crocheting elements over old blankets, leather, paper or plastic, just as the modelling of rubber and found objects. She is interested on the treatment of the word, and the sculpture of the language as crocheting or drawing.

The artwork of Guillermo García Cruz, (Montevideo, 1988) reflects over the representation of the glitch concept. Glitch is a term that comes from the computer science and makes reference to a temporary error that is corrected on some moments. In difference to the bugs, the glitch doesn’t destroy the system, instead, it is temporary twisted. This temporary twist is assimilated to the COVID-19 crisis, an event comparable to the changes of paradigm created by the Berlin’s Wall Fall, or the World Wars and that for the first time affects to the millennial generation. This phenomenon can be related to the investigation that García – Cruz have been realizing since some years and talks about the functioning of the art world, questioning the institutions and their mechanisms of power.

Is about a visual displacement referred to a global disruption that is also related to the functioning of the artistic institution. The virtual fairs, the 3D tours, the long distance exhibitions, have came to stay?, or are they part of this glitch that will come back when the “error is corrected in the system”? Actually, we have no idea of how this will affect the institution of the arts, to the spaces or to the walls that are here, but definitely we know we are in the middle of a seism. The belonging and the collaterals of this incision in the line time are part also of this project, since the own action of modify the gallery will be reverted in some moment, making come back this exhibiting space to a state of previous normality to the intervention site specific carried out to this sample.

This doble exhibition get us closer to two different ways to experiment the present: Magna Arnaud from a personal diary and poetic that makes count throughout phrases, textures and objects, of everything that she experiments as an artist; Guillermo García Cruz from the transformation of the exhibition space as a symbol of change, global crisis, and regeneration of the artistic institution. Both sights, from the personal or the global, are searching a moment of change that we are seeing in this ending of 2020.