Happenings provides references on art events, exhibitions, biennales, art fairs and festivals, with a focus on Abstraction in Action artists and post-90s abstraction from Latin America.
En la sala de proyectos se mostrará un atlas cartografiado del artista Iván Navarro. Este proyecto de dibujo llamado “FEO” surge a partir de su interés por la estética, la asimetría, el error, la rareza típicas de la individualidad humana. Esta exposición está acompañada por el lanzamiento de la publicación FEIO editada por La Silueta en el año 2014.
En la sala princcipal de la galería, Ricardo Muñon Izquierdo, mostrará obra sobre papel producida en los últimos cuatro años. A través de yuxtaposiciones absurdas de iconos del arte, con humor, cinismo, y deformación alegórica acentúa tensiones dialéctivas entre lo público y lo privado, lo culto y lo marginal.
Contour Editions will be presenting a series of recordings of Richard Garet performing live. This online release is the latest development of the labelʼs effort to present works that explore the various possibilities of sound, while also engaging with studio experimentation, materiality, processes, and diverse techniques to create and treat material and media. The labelʼs objective is to reach listeners and spectators on a personalized level while facilitating the independent distribution of sound and visual artistʼs work that are often hard to experience within the local community or the cultural landscape of the world at large.
Richard Garet’s approach to working with sound live focuses on creating processes that interact and activate sonic material such as electromagnetic waves, treated tape and audio cassettes, cracked media, sonification of light and data, information noise, and computer processing. Over the years his work has evolved from laptop playing to a more hands on type of approach, focusing on sound and material that could encompass a more tactile malleability and less playback. Garet’s preparations to working live with sound evolve from studio practice and these developments establish the artist’s material and set of possibilities to work and interact with in front of an audience.“It is really pointless trying to coin a term for working with sound live. I feel that adjectives and names describing audio art today apply to a certain degree but it does not represent a practice that uses broad methods and techniques. Much goes into the mix, and much goes into consideration. There are moments of improvisation but then there is a control-and-memory at play. There is much knowledge involved as well triggering things as much as the desire to run faster than the mind has time to dictate the next move. Therefore during a live set there is much space for risk and discovery. There are preselected methods and there are elements of surprise. There is electricity. There is analog and digital but most importantly there is hope and there is optimism! And overall there must be progress. Presenting sound live for me has always had a fixation to time, and it involves more than one time, more than one memory, and many approaches to craft-and-media tailoring ideologies for listening that also challenge reception and notions of listening, physicality, and awareness. I like to think that making this work embodies imagination and action that embraces sculpting in time as a dominant understanding of physical space and physicality shifting within space. It is also fascinating how material objects that create sonic energy, shred air, and change and affect a temporal situation. It is like having additional arms and legs for voicing out wordless forms that carry out powerful communication. Performing live with audio to me consists of piling efforts that sum up to a temporal temper that interconnects people within a particular environment and time capsule. It can make you as aware of sound as it can of its absence and yet be felt besides being heard. It is a directness that not only produces a faculty to touch others but also a vehicle for experiential transcendence, psychological connections and thought that leaves the room with you. Performances become alive inside a space or with the absence of one but most importantly are also collectively lived.”
The graphic representation of the visible spectrum of light, shows us a line with 4 colors fused, in order: violet, blue, yellow and red. Upon multiplying the lines and assigning each one a color on a scale greater than 140 colors, creates a more energetic relationship with the space. The paintings of “Stay in Space” are composed of a 140 (approximately) color palette. These colors change their hues and tones as they are being prepared. On, or “in” this mesh of lines, a group of straight lines and diagonals are drawn that cut the gentle flow of colors, to build more hard geometric shapes. This contrast is again involved in space, but this time, registers it mentally.
These paintings are accompanied by others decidedly more concrete in their geometry (“Blue Spiral”, “Endless blue”, “That network”), which confirms the persistence of Burgos in working space in a sensitive and symbolic way: symbolic in terms of space as an optical game of “truth and falsehood”.
To this insistent work on the preparation and search for colors, Burgos adds their distribution on the surface of the canvas. Sometimes the method used is intuitive; other times, mathematical (application of rule of three on the square root), a simple mechanism that Burgos uses as a random instrument to switch longer fragments of colors with other shorter ones.
Through this means a reading of blocks and forms is established, which calls every viewer to interpret with his own subjectivity. One can see in that weave of colors: spectral shapes, numbers, letters, or any other interpretation that one gives the works, like a misty narrative. However, the contrast of forms and the permanence in space, is what really occupies Burgos.
Finally, Burgos expresses once again his identification with and admiration for some Latin America’s mid-20th century geometric artists. He involves himself with them and establishes a dialogue as of today, with the differences and particularities that the passing of time imposes. In “Stay in Space” he pays a tribute to the Ecuadorian artist Manuel Rendón (Despues de Rendon, 2014).
Fabian Burgos was born in Argentina in 1962, where he currently lives and works. He is a self-taught artist and participated in Atelier Felipe Noe (1987-85), Atelier Ahuva Szlimowicz (1988-1987) and Fundacion Antorchas Scolarship organized by Guillermo Kuitca (1993-91), all them in Buenos Aires. Selected Solo Exhibitions include: Instante Eterno. Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Buenos Aires (MACBA), 2014; Comiéndose a Raúl, Galería Vasari, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2013; Abstracta, Galería Dabbah Torrejón, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2010, and Conferencia de Prensa, Galería Alejandra Von Hartz, Miami, USA, 2007. Selected group exhibitions are:Recovering Beauty: The 1990s in Buenos Aires. Blanton Museum of Art. Houston. Texas, 2011; Art First, Colección MACBA Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires, Fundación Pablo Atchugarry, Manantiales, Punta del Este, Uruguay, 2011; 4 Museos + 40 Obras. Muestra Itinerante de Colección MACBA; Arte en el Plata, Intervención artística sobre la fachada del Edificio del Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina curated by Inés Katztenstein and Eva Grinstein, 2009; Geometrías dislocadas, Burgos, Door, Siquier, Sala Mendoza, Caracas, Venezuela, 2009; All Boys, en el Rosa x 6, Rosa Galisteo Museum, Santa Fe, Argentina, 2009; Escuelismo. Arte argentino de los 90, MALBA Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2009; Pintura Latinoamericana Contemporánea (in Guayaquil Coleccions), MAAC Museo Antropológico y de Arte Contemporáneo, Guayaquil, Ecuador, 2008.
He is currently developing large commissioned murals for the SLS Hotel and Brickell Heights project to be completed in Miami in 2015.
In Between
February 3 – 24, 2015 (London)
March 19 – April 18, 2015 (Paris) MDM Gallery
London, UK and Paris, France
The fruit of a 6-month residency at La Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, In Between is Part One of Rodrigo Sassi’s first European solo exhibition: London 3 – 24 February and Paris 19 March – 18 April 2015 at MDM Gallery in partnership with Gallery Nosco | Frameless (London).
