1 Irma Blank

Autograph or the Before-text, 25-7-01], 2001
Ballpoint pen on canvas. 100 x 204,6 cm

This work is part of the series Avant-testo, which Blank began towards the end of the 1990s. The artist focuses on registering the passage of time as a gesture, and her practice is located somewhere between drawing and writing, evoquing the book as a space, and also including paintings and silk screen prints. In the case of Ur-schrift ovvero Avant-testo, the linear logic of the written word is disrupted in order to describe time as a circular movement that begins and ends with the artist and her material traces.

 

2 Nicolás Ortigosa
Divine Comedy. Purgatory, 2011
Three graphite on paper. 70 x 100 cm each

Nicolás Ortigosa gives evidence of a gesture, an act of writing, through drawings and etchings that investigate the limits of their supports. He worked for a decade (2005- 2015) on a series of drawings and etchings on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, creating an interpretation of the text that emerged as he read. The three works in the exhibition are part of the series dedicated to the Purgatory, and are characterised by a fluid and delicate trace, a gesture that brings them close to writing.

 

3 Patricia Gómez – María Jesús González
Book-cell 131, 2009
31 wall prints on canvas. 100 x 60 each

The Libros-celda [Book-Cell] series is a “project for an abandoned prison” that focuses on architectural details and registers (marks, writings, drawings) found inside the prison cells of the old Cárcel Modelo de Valencia, which closed its doors in 1993. Within the prison, the inmates operated according to a iconographic system of rules, values and conducts. An archive of that memory — of the building’s skin and the inmates’ graphic expressions or tracks — is recovered by the artists and presented in a container-box. The box was made of the iron door of the cell that they intervened.

 

4 Fernanda Fragateiro
ER, 2017
Black coated stainless steel and manufactured notebooks with fabric cover. 200 x 120 x 20 cm

The focus of Fernanda Fragateiro’s interest is to rethink and probe modernist practices, by altering already-existing objects (or landscapes) through a minimalist aesthetics of form, colour and texture of surfaces, in an attempt to reveal constructions and transformations buried in them. Part of her production incorporates books within sculptures and installations, which she turns into modular elements and conceptual signs.

 

5 Inma Femenía
Stiffness, 2016
UV print and manipulated aluminium. 191 x 694 x 23 cm (total)

Inma Femenía works with perception as it is determined by digital media, which she understands as a language that modifies the appearance of forms. By working with processed light spectrums, metals and other supports, she gives a skin, a tangible and real experience to digital technology. In the case of this work she also manipulated the supports in order to instill in them a tension that not only generates uncertainty in the spectator, but also distorts the chromatic range of the work.

 

6 Teresa Lanceta
Stripes, 1999
Mixed media. 250 x 150 cm

Since the beginning of the 1970s, Lanceta focuses her artistic production on “weaving” as a means of expression, exploring the limits of what an artwork may be. Her approach to textiles is invested in their formal elements, on what is original and characteristic of each textile (the techniques, traditions, materials, etc.). Through textile she investigates a primary, universal and collective code that allows for the reading and transmission of lived stories.

 

7 Patricia Gómez – María Jesús González
Calle San Pedro 27 (El Cabanyal), from the series La casa desplegada [The deployed house], 2005
Wall print on canvas. 250 x 1200 cm

8 Patricia Gómez – María Jesús González
Room rosa (Calle Mediterráneo 29, El Cabanyal), from the series A la memoria del lugar [To the memory of the place], 2007-2008
Wall print on canvas. 243 x 1500 cm

Patricia Gómez and María Jesús González intervene unused, abandoned spaces, and recover the walls through strappo, a restoration technique that rips off the wall’s surface. This technique has its origins in archaeology, where it is used to recover pictorial testimonies and the intimate memory of spaces for archival and protection purposes. These two projects intend to recuperate for the memory a former abattoir and a modernist house from the historical neighbourhood of El Cabanyal in Valencia, which have been threatened by an urban reform plan since the 1998.

 

9 Heimo Zobernig
Untitled, 2015
Oil on canvas. 200 x 200 cm

 

10 Heimo Zobernig
Untitled, 1982-2012
Twenty gouache on canvas. 30 x 21 cm approx. each

Heimo Zobernig questions art’s narrative within disciplines such as architecture, design and theatre, reflecting on the exhibition model through the principles of geometric abstraction and the use of simple forms. He works with cardboard and wood, but also with traditional media such as oil painting and gouache. In these works he ironically explores the possible drifts of Minimal, Pop and other artistic movements.

 

11 David Reed
N. 615, 2011
Oil and alkyd paint on linen. 101,6 x 355,6 cm

Since his earliest works in the 1970s, David Reed has found inspiration on the legacies of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Conceptual art. However, he criticises certain aspects of these movements, and is interested in new forms of creating images through cinema, television and digital media. Even though he begins with the traditional media of painting, his fragmented strokes refer to an almost industrial and impersonal manufacture, refusing any gesture or impulse that may not have been calculated beforehand.

 

12 Barbara Kasten
Transposition 9 [Transposició 9], 2014
Impressió digital Flujiflex 152,5 x 122 cm

 

13 Barbara Kasten
Scene 2, 2012
Flujiflex Digital Print. 138,5 x 110,5 cm

Barbara Kasten constructs large-scale abstract interiors. The interaction of light, objects and mirrors reveals new experimental possibilities for the photographic medium. Her rooms, built with materials that suggest an architectural character – glass, wood, plaster or plexiglass, for example – are interiors that she transforms into abstract and geometric compositions through shadow, light and reflection. What results are images that show the distortion of scale and perspective, and which relate to Constructivism.

 

14 Roland Fischer
Façades On Paper. Series I, II, III i IV
2001, 2005, 2008, 2012
8 photographic serigraphs each series. 73,5 x 51,2 cm each

Roland Fischer uses digital photography’s tools to represent and make visible what we are not able to appreciate in reality. He defines photography as a medium related to painting, and his work is fundamentally articulated in relation to two main themes: portraiture and architecture. In regards to the latter, as the Façades On Paper series shows, Fischer captures abstract images that are reduced to geometric forms with no reference to their localisation, and that this way resist any attempt of interpretation.

 

15 El Último Grito
Mise-en-scène, 2014
Vinyl paper. Variable dimensions.

In this work, which was presented at the 10th Gwangju Biennial in 2014, vinyl paper with pixelated flames and smoke motifs runs along the walls of the biennial and establishes a dialogue with the rest of the exhibited works. These motifs’ plot becomes intelligible, but accompanies the visitors in their percourse. In this case, one of the spaces at Bombas Gens Centre d’Art has been covered up, in order to create a new architectural atmosphere and make other narratives plausible, in dialogue with the artworks around it.

 

16 Ángela de la Cruz
Weight (Cerulean Blue), 2017
Oil on aluminum. 159 x 165 x 7,5 cm

Ángela de la Cruz’s practice is located between painting and sculpture. Deformed, broken frames, twisted canvases, pieces leaning on the floor… These are deliberate and systematic gestures that pursue a crude an ironic result, a rupture with the canvas’s bidimensionality and an immersion within the tridimensional territory. Those violent gestures of painting’s self-destruction respond to an interest in disassociating herself from the grandness of art history and from painting’s canonical aspirations.

 

17 Carlos Bunga
Pictoric Construction #19r, 2016
Wood, cardboard, paint, glue. 180 x 150 x 10 cm

Carlos Bunga is inspired and intervenes within the architectural environment through his installations, but also with the other formats he uses (sculpture, painting, drawing, performance and video). His creation process is visible in all his works, which often employ daily and humble materials to investigate the interrelation of a set of binomials: constructing- destroying, doing-redoing, micro-macro, investigation-conclusion. The result are apparently delicate works that are born from the study of combinations of colour and materiality, and that simultaneously emphasise performativity and the creative act.

 

18 Pedro Cabrita Reis
Les Verts #2 [The Green Ones #2], 2012
Acrylic on canvas. 171,5 x 121,5 x 13,5 cm

Pedro Cabrita strips his works from the real to secure an abstraction that aims to synthesise issues ranging from the materialisation of time to the restructuring of the space. Through construction materials or “found objects”, Cabrita reveals matter rather than painting, and structure rather than sculpture. In the Les Bleus and Les Verts the artist works from advertising posters – painting’s rivals according to him – and covers them with a layer of acrylic that invades the canvas, but leaves a strip of linen on view. The frame is made of metal and glass billboards.

 

19 Fernanda Fragateiro
Muro [Wall], 2017
160 solid blocks of pink prefabricated concrete. Variable dimensions variable.
Courtesy of the artist / Galeria Filomena Soares (Lisbon)

The artist’s references to architecture are apparent in her work titled Muro [Wall], a concrete brick wall solidly built in the space, which is deliberately destroyed in the middle. The piece was conceived as a ruin in dialogue with Indeterminate Façade Building, a work from 1975 by SITE (Sculpture In The Environment).

«Hyperespaces»: A reflection on architecture and perception in contemporary art, through a selection of works from the Per Amor a l’Art Collection.

 

“In contemporary art, architecture has definitely become a relational surface, where movement gives form to spaces and our ourselves.”

Marisa García Vergara

 

«Hyperspace» is a term used by contemporary physics to refer to a space that has more dimensions than the ones we are conventionally familiar with. From this concept, and from a way of conceiving perception that involves the sensorial and the cognitive, space is understood as a product of projections from our memory and our actions, rather than a simple container of objects and bodies.

From this perspective, contemporary art develops an imaginative use of architecture: works that are conceived as memory maps, as internal or external constructions in flux, as fragments of lived spaces or mental states. Architecture becomes a surface, a skin, in tune with its original role of protecting the body. This notion of architecture as «skin» takes the form of an archive in Patricia Gómez and María Jesús González’s work —the memory of surfaces activated through matter, and made into a place of mediation for object and subject— and façades for Roland Fischer: the architecture of the contemporary metropolis turned into flat images —objects—, isolated from geographical context or human scale, as if they were abstract paintings. An archive that doesn’t document, cut off from any material reference or any link to reality, by means of abstraction and its serial nature. Barbara Kasten also uses photography, in her case to reproduce an imaginary space, created without attempting to connect to any reality, while David Reed and Heimo Zobernig use painting to appeal to perception and movement, and in that way reveal atemporal spaces through colour, contrasts of light and overlaid planes.

Another type of skin is revealed by Inma Femenía with her investigation around perception as conditioned by the digital realm, which gives form to a tangible and real experience in the physical world: the digital as a second nature, a terse and slippery skin that questions the idea of the screen as a flat and immaterial extension. Works by Ángela de la Cruz, Pedro Cabrita Reis and Carlos Bunga experiment with architectural elements, and propose a bridge between the reality of the artwork and the confirmation that such reality exists in daily life, evoking the memory of inhabited spaces. Assemblages of materials that are at the same time sculpture, painting and architecture without actually being any of the three. Such material nature returns to the spaces their transitory and nomadic condition, a characteristic they share with Teresa Lanceta’s textile work —the fabric as the skin of the originary space, which demarcated a place and constructed  a space— or Nicolás Ortigosa and Irma Blank’s act of writing on a surface that is also understood as an origin. Fernanda Fragateiro involves the body of the spectator or observer in her installations —located somewhere be-tween architecture and sculpture—, by directly intervening on the architecture of the exhibition space transformed by El Último Grito.

In conclusion, fourteen artists who present different plastic forms in dialogue with architecture, conceiving space as a material construction, product of a collective imaginary.

 

«Hyperspaces», curated by Julia Castelló, Nuria Enguita and Vicent Todolí, is accompanied by a book by artist Fernanda Fragateiro —designed in collaboration with Jaume Marco and edited by Fundació Per Amor a l’Art— and which includes a new essay by Marisa García Vergara. With the exception of the installation Muro (Wall), by Fernanda Fragateiro, all the works in the show are part of the Per Amor a l’Art Collection.

 

The exhibition commented by the curators: Nuria Enguita, Julia Castelló, y Vicent Todolí | (Spanish audio only)