_ Juan Carlos Bracho presents "Imitation of Life" in the film festival rhizome

With a program that this year revolves around the concept of fuzzy logic, the international film Festival Rhizome will project on November 23 in the Plato set of Cineteca/Matadero the Juan Carlos Bracho’s videoperformance “Imitation of life.”

The screen as a residual surface, and as a reference to our visual imaginary, has been a recurrent theme in the work of Bracho, as well as the landscape as a mirror of ourselves. Throughout his career, Bracho has reflected on the theme of the landscape from the abstraction, the fantasy, the dream or the gaze of the other, and for the first time the protagonist of this piece is a real landscape; The garden as an expression of a domesticated, codified and intellectualized environment. “Imitation of Life” is, in short, a proposal that delves deeper into the innermost sense of the idea of landscape-and on the mirror as a surface that reflects what does not belong to it. A reflection on what we perceive, on the screen and the images that these emit incessantly, increasingly ethereal, intangible and lacking meaning.

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Eder Santos presents in world premiere his work Barravento Novo in the Tate Modern

In 1967, Brazil was already living through a military dictatorship, but Glauber Rocha’s Terra em Transe [Land in Anguish] would unnervingly predict the more punitive turn the regime would take a year later. Looking at populist politics and the inescapable corruption of power in the nation, Land in Anguish revolutionised the filmmaker’s practice. Fifty years after its release, the experience of the film retains the force of its radicality, with its tumultuous separation of sound and image, intense performances from its actors and high operatic drama of Verdi and Carlos Gomes.

This key work of Brazil’s Cinema Novo or ‘new cinema’ movement is screened in dialogue with the world premiere of Eder Santos and Bruce Yonemoto’s Barravento Novo. The short video makes clever correspondences between Antônio Pitanga – a Cinema Novo actor seen here delivering lines from Rocha’s first feature, Barravento 1962 – and his daughter, Camila Pitanga, a well-known actor and filmmaker working today.

Actors Antônio Pitanga and Camila Pitanga, artists Eder Santos and Bruce Yonemoto, and film scholars Lúcia Nagib, Robert Stam and Ismail Xavier join us for this opening night of the film series.

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_ Artissima 17. Susan S.D. Themlitz participates with its latest project in the Disegni program

Where does the drawing go? Where’s the drawing? How far can we talk about drawing? He often wonders what it is to draw, when a drawing is a drawing, what is the object, how the drawing behaves in other media, where the person is, where the observer, the presence of the absence … Susanne S.D. Themlitz has developed within the Disegni program in Artissima a new project of drawings, paintings and sculpture with multiple landscapes and elements “microscopies” that enter into a fictitious dialogue with imagined voyages and dreams in literature of Antonio Tabucchi, Italian author who resided in Portugal.

_Daniel Martín Corona wins the DKV Award at the SWAB 2017 Art Fair with his work Vocation 3D

With “Vocation 3D” (2016), Martín Corona seeks a State of equilibrium between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional; on the grid, they burst polyhedra they transfigured the plane, and conceived a geometric chaos of edges that stick out and moving towards convex; It recasts the role of the project as intermediate phase; the process of creation as the work itself; you travel in a universe that explores the virtual from a plane of endless transformations, where opposites converge on the organicity of materials and abstract forms without leaving the drawing; While the laser lines plotted an order changing, uncertain, fragile, unstable coordinates that cross the surface morphology and end up stabilizing the composition. Is so, dismantle codes established structures, which are reversed to create new reflective levels; the gleam of the verse, where there seems impossible. + INFO

_Ignacio Bautista presents his new sculptures in Estampa 2017

Inside the program “Mapa”, curated by Guillermo Espinosa, and with the title “Powerline”, Ignacio Bautista presents a new series of sculptures that can be understood as a set of comments distanced about the elements of the gesture and the artist’s brand. But what is really seen in these works and installations is the questioning of the old romantic idea of creative freedom, alluding to how many factors influence and direct this supposed independence of action and production.

This work introduces us to a world full of references to the most basic elements of pictorial language and to the predominance of productive and procedural strategies of the genre in the broadest sense of the term. In the detained gestures, full of doubt and sarcasm, coexist the cold and expressionless air of industrial appearance, as of freshly refurbished product in a large warehouse, with usual materials, the ñapa or the fat brush, generating situations and paradoxes where objects or assemblages, without hardly forcing them or resorting to grandiloquent rhetoric, create a conceptual perspective plagued with allusions, dialogues and winks to the spectator, who is invited to decipher the commentary that hides behind his immutable appearance, do not exempt all of it from remarkable doses of humor, irony and lyricism in most of the occasions.

_Thievery / Thierry, new mural drawing by Juan Carlos Bracho for Opel / Estampa 2017

With a dimension of more than 25 square meters is a new specific project of Juan Carlos Bracho can be seen at the stand of OPEL during the Fair Estampa 2017. Made with the frottage technique is a combination of regular and irregular geometries that are duplicated by mode of a mirror. These forms, apparently with some order and internal structure, will be generated from frotagges with cakes applied directly on the wall. The end result will be a dynamic and moving combination. A great space to project the look, recreate in the smallest details or let yourself be carried by the whole of the work.

_Javier Arbizu and Karlos Martínez B. inaugurate the Hazitegia scholarship program of the Oteiza Foundation and the Huarte Center

The Oteiza Museum and the Center for Contemporary Art of Huarte have launched the Hazitegia (seed) program, dedicated to the promotion of artistic production around the work and aesthetic thinking of Jorge Oteiza. This action will have an annual periodicity and will consist of a residence of production in the Center of Contemporary Art of Huarte and will be completed with its later presentation in the Museum Oteiza.

“The dark, the mystic, the animate but soulless” is the title of the project of the artists Karlos Martínez B. and Javier Arbizu with which begins this new program and that part of the revision of the concept of macla, that alludes to the series homonymous of works realized by Jorge Oteiza.

The idea of “macla,” present in the work of Oteiza, will be revisited through a series of objects whose construction processes suppose an exercise of negotiation between the characteristics and dynamics of the materials and the intuition and desires of the artists. The maclas in Oteiza originate by the fusion of two or more bodies, which become inseparable due to the energy contained in the relation of their parts. There are similar phenomena in other fields of knowledge, such as astrology or biology, which have historically been considered magical or aberrant, not only because they are outside the norm but also because of the energetic load they imply.