Construction: background and figure_09/02/17_07/30/17_Dossier

On the occasion of the “Noche en Blanco“, Ángeles Baños Gallery presents the exhibition “Construction: background and figure”, from a series of pieces (painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, video…) by Sussane Themlitz, Javier Arbizu, Blanca Gracia and Juan Carlos Bracho, all artists in our gallery.

Broadly speaking, the work of art continues to be a “construction” from the reality, this becomes a ‘image’ as relational man, which as you said Nietzsche is “a builder animal metaphors”: you need to create narratives, imaginary, readings, Re/presentations… “images”, in short, to be able to relate to the world, with the other. In the drawings of nudes of Javier Arbizu (Estella, Navarra, 1994) the image is constructed in the paper after several layers of glazes, deleted and rubbed. Surprisingly, its vagueness, halfway between abstraction and figuration. For this

In the drawings of nudes of Javier Arbizu (Estella, Navarra, 1994) the image is constructed in the paper after several layers of glazes, deleted and rubbed. Surprisingly, its vagueness, halfway between abstraction and figuration. For this purpose, the technique used is an adaptation of the traditional painting on Serge. This allows an execution quickly and accurately, generating negative spaces of large vibration and subtle tonal variations and transparency using the reduction to the minimum of the process of application of paint and the use of color, shape, and light. Once never again is of course what happens… It corresponds to the public complete the work with his own eyes. 

With the video installation “Taboo/Terra nullius” Blanca Gracia (Madrid, 1989) recreates a theatrical space in which the dissection of a mountain serves as a wall to hide the viewer what happens on the other side, where projected a video animation. This shows a dense universe, governed by primitive thinking, magical, typical of animist societies. When a foreign subject transferred this sacred space his presence alters the existing balance, the territory, and its inhabitants begin to mutate in constant metamorphosis.

In the work of Sussane Themlitz (Lisbon, 1968) amalgamates a number of different states based on the consistency of the material and the gesture, and therefore also in his psyche at the time of the creation, which seems to dominate undetermined conditions, semi-controlled, almost automatic in the construction of its universe of images. “This -in the words of critic Oscar Alonso- has an amazing variety of records ranging from the accuracy of the Arabesque, and treated in an academic way to scribble figurative detail or scratches and linked to action paint drips, dressings and plasters dense oily matter or grassed spots.”

The video animation “La boule de niegue. History of a failure” of Juan Carlos Bracho (La Línea de la Concepcion, 1970) renews the myth of Sisyphus, arises as a narrative in which is mixed equally, reality, fiction, and collective work. A kind of vital and aesthetic ideology that advocates the thrill of the unexpected and that is seduced by the expectation of finding something unexpected. Because of our experiences, the accumulation of these, and how we know to manage them undoubtedly feeds our life. Finally and, paraphrasing to Ansel Adams, “a photographer does not make a photo just with his camera, also with the books he has read, the films he has seen, the trips he has made, the music he has heard and the people he has loved”.