Viewing Room
season 2020 – 2021
The wrongness of images, or our appreciations of them: What appears to be a painting is actually a photograph. What appear to be two-dimensional painted lines, curves, rectangles, arabesques, planes of color, or abstract geometrics with tromp l´oeil shadows are in fact three-dimensional objects carefully arranged, brightly illuminated, and flattened into a beguiling single plane by the lens of a camera.
The eye recognizes but cannot entirely unravel distortion; the mind flits between different possibilities. However, as with Wittgenstein´s duck- rabbit, Escher´s irrational cube, or Penroseés tribal, no settled reality emerges. Is the swath of turquoise blue in Circle, Circle flat or angled? How does one black circle face us directly, while the other lies flat and foreshortened, like Holbein´s famous disk-shaped skull?
O´Keefe´s photographs, subtly, even cheerfully, disrupt the eyes´s or the cameras ability to comprehend space. The artist´s work recalls her background in architecture, a discipline in which model building – the construction of synthetic trials and variants of space in miniature as a means of testing possibilities – is essential.
O´Keefe produces images that are also intensely painterly, with a sensitive understanding of the spatial play, perspective, color, and incongruity in the works of artists as varied as Josef Albers, Giorgio de Chirico, Le Corbusier, Henri Matisse…O´Keefe´s works are more than canny analog reminders of the digitally manipulated images and technological unrealities that surround us, of our need to remember that we do not always know what we are looking at. Her photographs assert the positive value of uncertainty and not knowing and induce the pure retinal pleasure of trying to unriddle a collision of colors and planes that shift and slide, refusing to stay fixed. They are the product of a practice in which repetition – not to mention , time, effort, patience and absorption – produces unexpected combinations.
In O´keefe´s tiny, jewel-colored constructions photographed large, the space of the studio-iterations of space within this space – transcends itself for a momento only. The are records of an artist thinking in two and three dimensions at once.
Francisco Rodriguez’s painting is a kind of journey towards intriguing spaces and situations, sometimes dark and sometimes inexplicable; on ordinary and often impenetrable occasions
Taken together, these works are unexpected narratives, like Japanese haiku, full of innuendo and ambiguous ellipsis. But it is not only in its significant projection that Rodriguez seems to establish his relationship with Japan; His solid color flat painting, his simple drawings and compositions also refer to graphic animations and Japanese drawings and to that tradition that inspired so many Post-Impressionists.
But his prolific work also encompasses and unfolds around complex narratives that address strategies and resolutions closer to films and to conjunctions between literature and his imagination. In many cases, his compositions are developed around these confluences, like paintings composed of several paintings, relationships and disjunctions that make up images, stories and spaces that combine to offer us a frieze of his vast imaginary.
It is about slowing down the process of that energetic imagination — which is undoubtedly reinforced in all those references mentioned — and making our experience of the work more open, and perhaps more enigmatic.
Octavio Zaya
The trajectory of the Mexican GT Pellizzi,stands out from the creation of the Bruce High Quality Foundation, a collective of artists conceived from the fictitious figure of a deceased sculptor and that pursues the intervention in the public space and the relationship with the community, caring about the condition of the subject in society. Pellizzi decided to disband from the group in 2011, with the aim of starting an individual artistic career based on the use of basic materials.
In the Complex Shapes sample, he continues with this idea, starting with a range of basic colors -red, yellow, blue and green- in the pieces on display. These are generic three-dimensional objects, some hanging on the wall, others strategically placed on pedestals with classic aesthetics, which in turn describe, simplify and abstract everyday objects: boats, the sea, a landscape, etc.
This extreme reduction in basic colors inevitably refers to Piet Mondrian, in his search for the absolute, as well as establishing a strong connection with architecture.
Not in vain Pellizzi has training as an architect, and this is reflected in different planimetric distributions in many of his pieces. Blue Rectangle over Yellow Rectangle over Red Rectangle stands out, in which the author conceives a corridor from which two disordered spatial languages emanate and merge. It is precisely this confusion that provides the character of amusement to the pieces on display. When you look at the gallery as a whole, you get the impression that it is a game room and not an exhibition hall.
The author conceived the Complex Shapes pieces in an artistic residency granted by the gallery for several months on the island. It is therefore inevitable that the work on display by Pellizzi contains elements that refer to the island landscape. These are based on the obviousness of being surrounded by the sea. In the same way, the pieces produced also play with the concept of the logo since the proposal can be understood from the graphic design as the creation of a corporate image referring to the ground on which it sits and, at the same time, as pure entertainment.
Characterized by the continuous displacement and use of diverse media and materials, Alberto Borea’s practice is chiefly concerned with non-places, transit, mapping and identity.
The openness towards these media helps him define the development of an artistic proposal, where the object’s time and history take a fundamental importance within the plastic discourse. Growing up in Lima during Peru’s internal war of the 80’s has influenced his vision and artistic practice as well as his conceptual relationship with objects and their symbolism. The relationship between different cultures, the exotic, the western idea of the primitive, the center and the so-called peripheries, the Ruins and the promise of modernity are some of the conceptual interests in his practice. A reocurring theme in Borea’s work is the constant dialogue with objects, images and urban waste. Walking through urban spaces, accumulating and selecting elements/materials forms an integral part of his creative process. These objects are taken to the studio to be conceptualized and transformed.
Through writing, disintegrating language and transforming it into a symbolic object, Borea combines his interest in poetry and visual language. Elements of text are used as means of manipulation in the artist’s work. Borea’s work can be understood as a cartography or a constant mapping in search of his identity, from his paintings and sculptures to his actions and installations. In this way Borea uses the objects and his body to create unique metaphors that talks about social-political-existential concerns.
Heat Maps is the debut exhibition of an ambitious new body of work by Richard Mosse, shown at the Curve in London’s Barbican Art Gallery, opening February 2017, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne later that year.
Heat Maps attempts to foreground the biopolitical aspects of the refugee and migration situation facing Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. The project charts refugee camps and other staging sites using an extreme telephoto military-grade thermographic camera designed to detect and identify subjects from as far away as fifty kilometres, day or night.
The camera itself is export controlled under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations — it is regarded as a component in advanced weapons systems and embargoed as such — and was designed for border surveillance and regulation.
Reading ‘heat’ as both metaphor and index, these images attempt to reveal the harsh struggle for human survival lived daily by millions of refugees and migrants, seen but overlooked by our governments and ignored by many. Heat Maps is the debut exhibition of an ambitious new body of work by Mosse, which will be shown at the Curve in London’s Barbican Art Gallery, opening February 2017, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne later that year.
The camera elicits an alienating and invasive form of imagery but also occasionally tender and intimate. It tends to dehumanize and then rehumanize the bare life (Agamben) of the human figure of the stateless refugee and illegal economic migrant. It was specifically designed to detect, monitor, and police and is used against itself to map landscapes of global displacement and more powerfully represent ambivalent and charged migration narratives.
“I see photography not only as medium of artistic expression but first and foremost understand and question it as a technique integrated in our everyday life. Therefore, in many of my projects I use private photographs that I find in analogue and virtual archives. I am interested in understanding social processes linked to photographic media, more than in producing photographs myself. An image can be fixed on paper, projected through slides or visualized on screens, each era has its own photographic techniques and ways to use it. With my work I research photography as a cultural tool that structures perception, behaviour and memory on collective and individual levels.
My working process can be described as manual post-production that aims to turn photographs into palpable objects. By cutting, collaging, layering or installing photographs in space I tend to overcome the flat, two dimensional surface to which photographs and screens confront us.”
We are moving in stages to o.T. (painting) too. Step 1: the canvas is white but not monochrome. You can see irregular colored blobs on it. Step 2: The picture seems to consist entirely of white and colored areas that vary in size and shape. Step 3: The dates of the photos and the names of the photo paper manufacturers are legible on the white surfaces. They are the backs of analog photographs. Fragments of their colored fronts permeate the pictorial space. Human silhouettes and the outlines of objects become visible.
As in her long-standing collage series Mindscapes, Lulay works in o.T. (painting) with photo archives of anonymous strangers. While structures and colored surfaces are extracted from photographs in the Mindscapes and merged into fictional landscapes, o.T. (painting) a shimmering all over structure. Here photographs were completely broken down into their visual components and applied to a canvas with a brush. Concrete objects become splashes of paint and shapes. By reducing the original motifs to their outlines, an approach to the former picture content is prevented. The surface of the picture is pervaded by the flow of figurative and abstract elements that flow together in a spaceless noise.
“Serie de bailarines” es un grupo de imágenes donde la artista muestra su percepción de la sociedad cubana contemporánea, más concretamente desde los vínculos religioso-culturales provenientes de África, asimilados en la cubanía sin siquiera haber transcurrido más de 200 años. Lo que en época fue motivo de mucha discordia entre esclavos, criollos cubanos y colonos españoles. Tanto en lo que respecta las costumbres religiosas y las tradiciones culturales. Esta percepción de la vida cultural tradicional religiosa forma parte de la cubanía de manera cotidiana.
La artista con estas serie de fotografías quiere mostrar el amor entre razas, la percepción de la mujer blanca proveniente de españoles y el hombre negro africano, esclavizado. Ya que todavía hoy por hoy en el mundo cubano está mal visto, sigue siendo motivo de discordia en la sociedad. Loyola espera poder dar a entender a los espectadores que las razas no existen sino que el hombre es uno solo, que el amor entre ellas es más fuerte, transparente y real que el de cualquier otra unión por ser esta una pareja que trasciende lo cultural.
Las localizaciones que la artista ha elegido para construir estos retratos románticos tienen que ver con los templos donde se efectúan ceremonias secretas de las religiones provenientes de África o lugares de reuniones de hermandades secretas como el Ñañiguismo. Crea un relato donde la mujer blanca se inicia en arraigadas tradiciones provenientes de tierras yorubas, utiliza atributos decorativos como joyas y vestidos específicas sin ser considerado tabú.
Mediante todos estos ingredientes Loyola consigue crear un correlato entre la cubanía, el mundo yoruba, el amor y la danza, plasmada en esta serie fotográfica donde se adentra en la génesis del culto, de lo mágico-religioso, dotando a las imágenes de una profundidad ancestral.
El trabajo está vinculado con la intención de mostrar a los espectadores la belleza y sensibilidad de los cuerpos amantes. Todo ello dotado de la tradición secular de la religión yoruba. La fotografía funciona como espejo de emociones personales, al ver los retratos danzantes percibimos no sólo la apariencia sino los sentimientos, emociones y experiencias.
season 2019 – 2020
La propuesta de la Galería Leyendecker para Pinta Miami 2020 es un stand individual con obras de G.T. Pellizzi: Cerámica y Luces.
Esta obra forma parte de una serie en curso de refundición de objetos plásticos cotidianos comprados en los mercados mexicanos en porcelana vitrificada vibrante. Muchos de estos objetos plásticos han reemplazado a otros objetos que fueron originalmente hechos en cerámica y otros materiales tradicionales. El plástico, sin embargo, no dura más de unos pocos cientos de años, por lo que sólo refundiéndolos en porcelana esmaltada existe la posibilidad de que un registro de estos objetos pueda sobrevivir para futuros milenios. El título se deriva de un poema del poeta romano Horacio. La frase original del poema de Horacio «Disjecta Membra Poetae» se traduce como: «los miembros desmembrados de los poetas» y la usó para referirse a los fragmentos de poesía perdidos en la historia. La frase fue usada más tarde para describir fragmentos de cerámica y encontrados por arqueólogos.
Made In Tenerife presenta algunas de las obras realizadas por nuestros artistas durante sus “residencias” en Tenerife, las cuales han sido expuestas en el pasado.
Pepo Salazar, 2011-2012
Gianfranco Foschino, 2013-2015-2016
James English Leary, 2016-2017
G.T. Pellizzi, 2017-2018
Alberto Borea, 2018-2019
Kennedy Yanko, 2018-2019
José Lerma, 2019-2020
En esta exposición contamos con dos artistas que han representado a sus países en la Bienal de Venecia: Gianfranco Foschino en 2014, Pabellón de Chile León de plata en la Bienal de arquitectura de Venecia y Pepo Salazar, un año después en el 2015 en el pabellón español.
Gianfranco Foschino, considerado en el sector artístico de New York como el Vermeer de Chile, posee un discurso fuertemente afianzado yclaramente comunicativo que permite recorrer los senderos del video-arte, dejando atrás el movimiento de la cámara. Esta manera tan personal de trabajar el video-arte le valió, en 2014, el León de Plata en la XXIV Bienal de Venecia. El halo místico que se crea en sus vídeos, implica una contemplación de espacios delimitados en un encuadre perfecto.
La serie presentada de Alberto Borea es una continuación de la que fue nominada al premio Art Nexus 2017.
En cuanto a James English Leary, que reside y trabaja en Estados Unidos, estudió en la prestigiosa institución de Nueva York The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art y es miembro fundador del colectivo artístico neoyorkino Bruce High Quality Foundation (BHQF) junto con G.T. Pellizzi, siendo ambos unos de los artistas emergentes más relevantes del actual panorama internacional.
La obra de Leary se caracteriza por el volumen de las formas y líneas que se presentan como “obra-hueco” en donde el lienzo adquiere una apariencia escultórica. El cromatismo intenso y el gran efecto volumétrico está presente en todas las obras.
Cada una de las obras que el artista G.T. Pellizzi realizó en residencia ha sido conceptualizada dentro de los cánones del arte occidental, resultando en objetos escultóricos y pictóricos ubicados en el contexto espacial, relacionándose con la arquitectura.
El artista José Lerma reside y trabaja en Chicago. Donde es profesor titular en la prestigiosa universidad School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).
Por último, Kennedy Yanko ve los materiales que utiliza como artefactos de las sociedades con diversas existencias, que llevan el peso del tiempo. Es por eso que visitar los astilleros de salvamento de la isla, como un intruso, resultó ser una experiencia excesivamente dura. Cargada de objetos de las cálidas Canarias, sintió la responsabilidad de transmitir su cultura y rendir homenaje a la introspección que inspiran.
