Abstraction in Action Fernando Carbajal, Eduardo Costa, Juan Raúl Hoyos, Gabriel de la Mora, Sergio Vega: Affective Architectures https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/fernando-carbajal-eduardo-costa-juan-raul-hoyos-gabriel-de-la-mora-sergio-vega-affective-architectures/

Flyer-Affective-Gamaliel[1]

Artists: Milton Becerra, Esteban Blanco, Carola Bravo, Monika Bravo, Tania Candiani, Fernando Carabajal, Consuelo Castañeda, Othon Castañeda, Eduardo Costa, Juan Raúl Hoyos, Pablo León de la Barra, Gonzalo Lebrija, Alberto Lezaca, Gabriel de la Mora, Atelier Morales, Ronald Morán, Bernardo Olmos, Ernesto Oroza, Gamaliel Rodríguez, Rafiño, Leyden Rodríguez-Casanova, Mariasun Salgado, Sergio Vega, and Viviana Zargón.

Affective Architectures
Curated by Aluna Curatorial Collective
Closing reception March 28th, 2015
Show ran from December 6, 2014 – February 15, 2015
Aluna Art Foundation
Miami, FL, USA

Amidst the flood of banal images, what artworks created through an inter-subjective dialogue with the architecture or the spaces inhabited by artists, have the power to move us and remain in our memory? This question was the point of departure in Affective Architectures, an exhibition curated by Aluna Curatorial Collective (Adriana Herrera and Willy Castellanos), and presented with the collaboration of the Instituto Cultural de México in Miami. The opening will be on December 6 at the headquarters of Aluna Art Foundation and the show will run until February 15, 2015.

Twenty three artists from Mexico, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Spain display specular visions of the architectures that are, or were, mirrors of the failed dreams of modernism in the continent, but they also reveal the potential reserves of creativeness that often manifest themselves in the midst of chaos or necessity.

Walter Benjamin, who left the legacy of a perspective of the world around him that was as critical as it was poetic, used to say that architecture was the oldest of arts because the human need for shelter is timeless. And yet, immersed in the architectures that model our cities, we perceive them absentmindedly, without discovering to what extent they contain and alter the acts of our existence.

For Benjamin, criticism was a matter of “the right distance”. The works exhibited reflect an affective gaze on the cities inhabited on the border between the public and the private: they are re­counts of the steps that have been walked, testimonies of having got lost, but also of groping for a way out. Many images, going against the wish to “do” or build characteristic of modernism, reveal the wish to “undo” or “deconstruct”, and track the past and the present of large cities, posing questions about what may be possible.

Paraphrasing what Gerhard Ritcher termed “the question of position”, each of the participating artists approaches inhabited architectures based on a constant negotiation between closeness and distance. They observe, without indifference —from the closeness of affectivity, but also from the distant perspective of memory—, architectures that contain ‘life deposits’, stored memories of life experiences in spaces, which often fuse with social histories everywhere in the world.

Affective Architectures functions as a mirror reflecting our biographies within the failure of the grand narratives in Latin American and Caribbean cities, but also as a window into alternative passages: strategies of the imagination that may allow us to reinvent our ways of inhabiting the world.

About the Instituto Cultural de México en Miami (Mexican Cultural Institute in Miami): The Instituto Cultural de México in Miami (ICMM) projects the wealth and diversity of the millenary culture of that country in Southern Florida. In addition to fostering the acquisition of knowledge on Mexico’s history, literature, cinematography and dramatic arts, it assigns special relevance to the new artistic trends and generations that are successfully developing in Mexico and that, due to their acknowledged quality, have achieved a solid projection at the national and international level.

March 30, 2015 Juan Raul Hoyos https://abstractioninaction.com/artists/juan-raul-hoyos/

Fortunately or unfortunately, I have had a formal artistic training. However, there is one aspect of it which has been decisive in the development of my career and it is that, almost unintentionally, I have fused photography and painting.

The interest I have always had in painting and architecture originates in the same source that my wish to draw near to photography springs from. In fact, the artists who have the strongest influence on my work are photographers or artists who work with photographic images.

The manner in which I have been working in recent years basically consists of manipulating photographic images I myself create, which I then process electronically. The images resulting from this method are then painted or printed with silkscreen frames. That is, I use this tool, the frame, as one of my paintbrushes.

Despite printing repeatedly, I have not produced numbered series or editions up to now. The works have always been individual modules, which, joined on a single surface, establish their own resonance.

They are really images of the city, urban landscapes of the place where I find myself.  They act as a frame, as ongoing reflections on a life between the domestic and the urban, as a sort of approach to the things which surround me. Like a zoom lens or a movie camera, my vision generally moves between the general and the particular and vice-versa, with neither a logical nor a consecutive chronology. At times, this technique unleashes a fairly meticulous approach to the objects and the portrait. On other occasions, the lens opens and I pause to observe the architecture of things. In short, my work is a constant exploration of the actual city which surrounds us.

 
Traducido del inglés

Afortunada o desafortunadamente, tuve una educación artística formal. Sin embargo, existe un aspecto de ella que ha sido decisivo en el desarrollo de mi carrera, el cual es que casi accidentalmente, he fusionado la fotografía con la pintura.

El interés que siempre he tenido en la pintura y la arquitectura tiene su origen en la misma fuente que mi deseo por acercarme a la fotografía. De hecho, los artistas que tienen mayor influencia sobre mi obra son fotógrafos o artistas que trabajan con imágenes fotográficas.

La forma en la que he estado trabajando en años recientes consiste en la manipulación de imágenes fotográficas que yo mismo creo, las cuales prosigo a procesar electrónicamente. Las imágenes derivadas de este proceso son pintadas o impresas con marcos de serigrafía. Es decir, utilizo esta herramienta, el marco, como uno de mis pinceles.

A pesar de imprimir continuamente no he producido series numeradas o ediciones hasta hoy. Las obras han sido siempre módulos individuales, los cuales al unirse en una sola superficie establecen su resonancia propia.

Son en realidad imágenes de la ciudad, paisajes urbanos del lugar donde me encuentro. Funcionan como un marco, como continuas reflexiones de una vida entre lo doméstico y lo urbano, como una especie de acercamiento a las cosas que me rodean. Tal como un lente de zoom o una cámara cinematográfica, mi visión generalmente se mueve entre lo general y lo particular y viceversa, sin una cronología lógica o consecutiva. En ocasiones, esta técnica desencadena una aproximación meticulosa a los objetos y el retrato. En otras ocasiones, el lente se abre y me detengo a observar la arquitectura de las cosas. En breve, mi obra es una constante búsqueda de la ciudad que nos rodea.

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January 21, 2015