Comité. Group exhibition.
Comité.
From December 15th 2021 until January the 15th 2022
Committee is the exhibition that opens the new Gallery Nueva space in the Las Letras neighborhood of Madrid. From December 15, 2021 to January 15, 2022
Artists: Liza Ambrossio, Cecilia Avendaño, Paloma Castillo, Magdalena Correa, Maï Diallo, Íñigo Flores, FOD, Marta Galindo, Guillermo García-Cruz, Elena Gual, Carlos Klett, Pablo Maojo, Andy Medina, Carolina Muñoz, Ignacio Navas, Luis Palmero , Concha Pérez, Samuel Ramiro and Olimpia Velasco.
The exhibition that begins this new space is entitled Committee, and shows the diverse aesthetics and plastic and visual interests of the members of the Nueva Gallery committee. This committee is made up of a group of collectors and art professionals who select the galleries and projects that want to temporarily settle in Madrid, both at the headquarters of Galería Nueva in Doctor Fourquet and in this new space in Las Letras. Many of the works in this exhibition have been loaned by some of its members, and others are a representation of the artists who have passed through Galería Nueva since, in January 2020, this project began at Doctor Fourquet 10. The works in the exhibition move around the fields of sculpture, photography, painting or installation.
Liza Ambrossio’s photographic work is loaded with theatrical and cinematographic gestures, fables, and imaginative power. Each composition tells a story about the characters that appear in the image, a reflection of the artist’s state of mind and feelings. His is a transgressive and irreverent aesthetic search between the strange and the everyday, the constructed and the fortuitous, the found and the sought, the accidental and the planned, the lived and the imagined.
In Precious Diseases, Cecilia Avendaño takes the photographic and digital technique to a particularly neat level, a five-year investigation around the construction of female characters resulting from a mixture of features: meticulously processed noses, mouths and eyes that treat the subject of the disease from different angles. In the process, the artist worked in collaboration with psychologists, botanists, designers, critics, architects with whom she met successively to shape this project.
Paloma Castillo’s production is based on textiles and the art of embroidery, developing issues that cut across technology, myth, modernity and social conflicts. His production proposes to the viewer the return to the analogical object and the reflection on manual making, in a hyper-technical context in which the artisanal seems to be banished.
Magdalena Correa has specialized in photographic and video research projects on isolated and extreme territories, where man lives in extreme circumstances. The work that can be seen in the exhibition belongs to the Suiti series, a project that brought her to meet the Suiti people, located in the town of Alsunga, in the western part of Latvia. The self-isolation suffered by the Suiti has helped to preserve their religiosity, their traditional customs, their own national costume, their dialect, more than 52 thousand popular songs…, a history and a tradition of more than 400 years. However, today the Suiti culture is in danger of extinction.
Maï Diallo shows us a work based on the clinical analysis of the overflows of the body through physical, digital and social prostheses. Diallo plans and designs utopias that subvert the manifestations of desire and the body. In this way, it represents a fragmented body image, reorganized and plunged into constant mutation, fleeing the corset of the hegemonic gaze. His work puts in conflict the dichotomy between open, perforated, stigmatized and fetishized bodies, and the rigid impermeability of the normative.
The work of Íñigo Flores arises from the blows of iron and the heat of fire, forming pieces of metal that rise above the ground in a light and subtle way. The herons that we see in this exhibition are a hymn to natural life, a tribute that its author pays to the land and the animals that he loves so much. His life in the countryside is closely linked to his sculpture, which emerges as a manifestation of his dreams in the midst of nature.
FOD (Francisco Olivares Díaz) explores in his production the presence of architecture beyond buildings. In the case of its sculptures, FOD uses all kinds of materials, from reused wood and cardboard to corrugated sheets, to couple them so that they obtain a different function from the one for which they were originally conceived. His work has evolved to escape the wall to occupy other spaces. The works he presents are dominated by geometry and linked to construction work processes in which various disciplines (painting, sculpture and architecture) dialogue and both complement each other when offering solutions that define spaces.
Issues such as death or fear appear in Marta Galindo’s work, leading us to reflect on our relationship with frequently consumed drugs and with medicine as a science that explores an interior that is as everyday as it is unknown. The techniques with which the author works are very diverse: painting, sculpture or video, including photography, are inspired by the Internet and networks, but also by current artists and thinkers, musicians and fictional characters. Fast & Happy is a mobile painting that presents us with a certain instability, at the same time that, with its soft materiality, it alleviates our pain in the collisions with the walls that we can find every day.
Guillermo García Cruz’s work reflects on the concept of Glitch. This term comes from computer science and refers to a temporary error that is corrected in some moments. Unlike bugs, the failure does not destroy the system, but instead temporarily throws it out of adjustment. This time shift is assimilated to the global crisis we are currently experiencing, an event comparable to the paradigm shifts created by the Fall of the Berlin Wall or the World Wars. This system failure affects all aspects of our new way of acting and behaving.
The painter Elena Gual is inspired by academic techniques, but builds and evolves from them to establish her own way of working with the spatula. Gual dedicates a large part of his production to portraits and the female figure, transmitting the strength, power and beauty of women through the impasto technique. His paintings juxtapose the geometry of each stroke with the soft and fleshy shapes of their faces. The use of color in his work is very meticulous, since he achieves a large number of nuances using few pasted brush strokes.
Carlos Klett invites us to think about the real forms that define the human being. His artistic production focuses on questions about the understanding of the human being and its nature as a body and a process of change. Far from the typical way of seeing it, Klett shows in many of his works a human being dissolved, stretched out and melting, a man without qualities, in the words of Robert Musil. In the piece that we find in the exhibition, we see a kind of mold, a negative organ that allows us to shape this liquid human being.
The sculptor Pablo Maojo walks a very personal artistic path built with incisions in the wood. His pieces are always initialed with cuts and holes, and finished with basic colors such as blue, black or red. With his work he manages to configure harmonies and iconographic universes full of symbols, lines, gestures and words that occupy and vacate the space listening to the advice of the landscape to offer fruits of a spontaneous and natural character. His tools are the chainsaw, the gouge and color, and in the process he lets himself be carried away by his innate impulses and an exquisite poetic capacity that takes advantage of the changes of season to speak day and night with the nature that surrounds us.
Andy Medina uses artistic language to explore, among other things, the identities of native peoples, subjected to linguistic and racial rejection. The pieces by the Oaxacan artist make the viewer sketch a smile and ponder what they enunciate, such as stereotypes and ignorance of the reality that others live. Medina also mixes images from the last century (logos of companies and institutions as a result of industrial development in the second half of the 20th) with graphic and sign languages, icons that all the time prove to be alive.
The attitudes of Carolina Muñoz’s characters owe little to naturalism. Their bodies seem to follow an anomalous pose, a deformation originating from the hybridization of characters of what the late modern tradition distinguishes between high and low culture. Everyday life resembles art, and the characters created by the artist behave as people do in front of the camera today. His figures are daughters of social networks. The artist reviews images from Instagram and other platforms in which different communities contribute their privacy to the public eye. Far from naturalism, these figures appear dissolved by ridiculous or theatrically mannered poses, as if the presence of a camera’s eye made any naturalness impossible – and undesirable. In their intricate game of references and quotes, these works by Carolina Muñoz affirm with humor and virtuosity an artistic investigation that mixes characters, forms, references to popular culture and stories.
Ignacio Navas presents his photographic book Mr. Stupid, a series of photographs in a box accompanied by a publication. This work is the visual diary of an endearing character, Mr. Stupid, who circulates around the world confronting absurd situations, whose only explanation is found in the flows and drifts of the economy. The protagonist takes his name from the famous phrase coined by James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist in the 1992 campaign: “the economy, stupid.” This expression is a creative myth, the origin of a culture and of Mr. Stupid, the representation of any inhabitant of the Western world, vulnerable to the fluctuations of the markets. To project the subjective reality of our protagonist, the technique of photogrammetry is used. This technique allows the photographed objects to be translated into three-dimensional models and manipulated in 3D modeling programs, expanding the possibilities of photography as a medium and taking a new step in the documentary language of its author.
Landscape and architecture are the main motivations for Luis Palmero’s painting. His work is based on a solid geometry -or colorful geometric abstraction- where all his visual language becomes an effort of synthesis and containment. In his paintings he tries to reduce the elements to the minimum necessary gesture or form, as well as to restrict the color palette, always vivid and saturated. Although it is known for its smooth and flat surfaces, it does not neglect the charge and the pictorial texture, always using defined, firm and sure gestures. His work has been marked by a minimalist vocation devoted to painting, with a great poetic charge and with constant reflections on its limits.
The project What we are left with, by Concha Pérez, is made up of a photographic series that shows in an implicit way all the changes, uses and reactions that occur in our environment every day. It shows those mutated landscapes to be rebuilt in their own destruction. In his work Red there are remains of furniture and other objects that have been suspended in a strange space, which could seem to us the scene of a nightmare. Pérez creates interior images generated by the increase in the chaos in which we currently live, looking for spaces that are abandoned to chaos, as waste, as waste matter, as disorder, as ruin, as rubble. In this series we observe and reflect on everything that remains to be expected, to use, to seek, to exploit, to fight, to accept, to teach, to demonstrate, to empty …
Samuel Ramiro is a young photographer who has focused his production on the concept of memory. To answer the question about what we can expect, Ramiro tries to show us the ambiguity of the situations. In the photograph Loss of memory we can witness this uncertainty: is this person emerging? Or, on the contrary, is he sinking in the water? What shape is truly real? The reflection or the emerging figure? This constant doubt remains in our thoughts in all kinds of senses. It is impossible to know what the next step is. It is an image of concern for the future. We do not know what to expect, the uncertainty in the face of reality makes our thinking enormously difficult.
Olimpia Velasco starts from painting and drawing to vindicate the process of artistic creation not as a mere human artifice, one more of so many meaningless activities that saturate our busy schedule, but as its own, timeless current, a flow immersed in becoming of the cosmos, like the falling leaf, the migrating bird or the tide that renews a coast every day. The work that we have on display presents a bower that intersects with the artistic gesture, a red circular line, a repetitive and solid line.
Gallery New Las Letras
This new space in the Las Letras neighborhood arises as a collaboration between Daniel Silvo, director of Galería Nueva, and Alexia Mossay, who will be in charge of managing this second project headquarters. This initiative tries to satisfy the demand from national and international galleries to exhibit in Madrid in short periods of time ranging from one week to two months. Since January 2020 Galería Nueva has offered its headquarters in Doctor Fourquet to galleries such as SET Espai d’Art (Valencia), Prometeo Gallery (Milan), Isabel Croxatto (Santiago de Chile), Pigment (Barcelona) or Division of Labor (Worcester, UK), among many others. Twice a year the Galería Nueva selection committee meets to select, from among the dozens of applications, those projects that will complete the exhibition calendar of Galería Nueva. From now on, galleries and initiatives outside of Madrid will find a second space where they can exhibit their artists.