EMERGE’24. UFV

The professional career of the artist is, it is said, a long-distance race. This is because it is a life commitment, a dedication that begins from the first day a person decides to transform his or her love of painting into a professional career. This step is usually taken at the time of choosing university studies, around the age of 18, but its germ has been there for several years: perhaps since that 10-year-old girl chooses painting as an extracurricular activity, or since that boy feels proud to have his drawings adorning the fridge in the kitchen at home. In this exhibition we have a group of six artists who decided several years ago that they wanted to dedicate their lives to art, and today they are participating in one of their first professional exhibitions in an art gallery in Madrid.

Carmen Alum, Amanda Legorburu, Marta Pérez Terroba, Paula Redondo, Carmen Vizcayno and Candela Zamora present their work at Galería Nueva Las Letras through the EMERGE project, an initiative of the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria that seeks to give a final boost to its art and design students before they embark on their professional careers. Curated by its professor Daniel Silvo, this exhibition is a sample of the concerns and preoccupations of a generation of artists who have finished their studies in 2024 and who are already producing solid, complex, well-executed work that can be confronted without fear with that of those artists who until now were their references and are now their professional colleagues. Their projects speak to us of a generation of artists concerned about their personal relationships, social digitalisation, the unreal image of the networks, the survival of traditions, the dialogue between the artisanal and the technological or the concern for the nature of our bodies.

This is how Paula Redondo’s work welcomes us to the room, a series of paintings that take us to the most intimate sphere of the bathroom, that space where the familiar aesthetic is manifested through tiles, coloured toilets, decorations and borders that have accompanied us throughout our lives but that now, if we look at them critically, we accept them with a feeling that moves between nostalgia and rejection.

Next to them we find a large tapestry by Amanda Legórburu intervened with thread and incorporating references to Dante’s Inferno, Goya’s paintings or her own personal imaginary. These interventions re-signify a rococo landscape, the scene of amorous activities and fun, which is transformed into a place of blindness, flames and bad omens.

Opposite this, we see the work of Carmen Alum, a series of paintings of abstract geometry that remind us of computer-generated polygons that simulate landscapes or figures. In her paintings we think we see recognisable shapes, but they are veiled by the simplification of these polyhedral forms. Each one is dominated by a primary colour, except for the fourth, in which browns, ochres and cold tones can be seen.

Candela Zamora’s pictorial installation is a superposition of bodies, a succession of translucent organic forms that reveal layers and layers of skin, limbs and torsos without names or surnames. Like contortionists, these enormous bodies turn their backs on us, but at the same time they allow us to see through them and their deformity.

Alongside these bodies of monumental and disturbing scale we observe other bodies made by Marta Pérez Terroba, this time of small size, which defy the canon that contemporary society imposes on women. These ceramic figures show us non-normative, beautiful bodies accompanied by everyday objects, such as a mobile phone or a trainers.

Finally, we come to Carmen Vizcayno’s sculptural and photographic installation, a space flooded with volumes and colour. The same digitally treated photographs, taken to the extreme of colour contrast, are forms that emerge from the paper, volumes of figures that, in a performative act, seem to want to escape from the two dimensions to surround us.