Author name: jorgelopez

The Madrid-based José de la Mano gallery and the Valencia-based Jorge López gallery travel to Turkey to participate in the fair: Contemporary Istanbul 2024.

The exhibition project for IC (Istanbul Contemporary 2024) brings together two prominent artists of Turkish and Armenian origin whose lives and works reflect the complex dynamics of migration and interculturality, exploring the revaluation of identities and shared origins. Joseph Terdjman (1924-2001), born in Armenia and emigrated to Paris, where he developed his work and artistic practice, and Volkan Diyaroglu, born in 1982 in Istanbul and living in Berlin.

In keeping with the Palán-Palán spirit, the Jorge López gallery opens its doors to various "invasions," unexpected appearances of other people's works: in some cases the guests are friends, in others, admired artists, and in still others, the choice is almost random. In any case, the encounter enriches both parties and clarifies their mutual intentions: Alberto sets himself the challenge of seeing himself through the other, unraveling in brief texts the bond that unites him to those who cohabit his space.

As the boundary between self and other blurs, the notions of authorship and ownership also become more complex: the interchangeable relationship between everyone and the mutual redefinition of the exhibition and, more generally, the system, even in terms of symbolic value.

Excerpt from a text by Benedetta Casini, Independent Curator.

This project was created for the CerARTmic 2025 fair, bringing together three outstanding artists: Javier Bravo de Rueda, Eduardo Barco, and Pablo Bellot. It unfolds like an impossible catalogue, an archaeology of situations that never existed, yet inhabit each ceramic work.

Here, ceramic is treated as a living form, one that remembers, that breathes, that screams, that writes and that dreams.

The project begins with an intuition: ceramics are not just fired earth; they are a voice hardened by flame, a bowl, an urn, a brick.

Each piece holds an echo in three states: fire, scream, and code.

Ceramic here is more than a mere object.

It is witness.

It is voice.

It is archive.

Tierra de Nadie is the winning project of the first edition of the Petrona Program, an initiative of the Department of Cultural Internationalization of the Ministry of Education and Culture of Uruguay and supported by Miguel Hernández University of Altea, Spain

The project is part of Jorge López Galería's second residency, where Uruguayan artist Candela Bado is invited to work for a month at Miguel Hernández University of Altea, and is curated by Agustina Bornhoffer.

Candela Bado creates installations that consider the relationship between objects that divide domestic interior space and the exterior structures that operate it. In her work, she uses tiles to explore their boundary function, simultaneously recording the transformation of matter on their surfaces. In the accumulation and arrangement of these ceramic elements, the grid becomes a system of order and tension, articulating a spatiality that proposes new forms of interpretation through zenithal observation and the constellation of objects.

From a material perspective, Tierra de Nadie From a material perspective, Tierra de Nadie examines the transit of bodies in and out of the home through the circulation of elements such as water, glass, ceramics, and metal, placing the function of these constructed sites in tension, whether as a place of containment or exclusion. In this sense, the work questions the way architectural languages have been used to impose norms of order and separation in living space.

Candela Bado (Montevideo, 1991) is a visual artist who works with sculpture, ceramics, and installation, exploring the power of liminal objects and their relationship to space and memory. She studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and Columbia University in New York. Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as Wallach Gallery in New York, TENT Rotterdam, and Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan, among others. She will soon participate in the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture residency in the United States.

This project is a cultural maze that connects artists from Europe and Latin America, mirroring the migrant’s journey. Five artists present works that evoke a “cante de ida y vuelta”,enriched by influences from both sides of the Atlantic. The works on display trace cultural routes, exploring themes of belonging and displacement. This journey culminates in a reflection on migration and artistic transformation, bridging oceans and cultures in an ongoing exchange.

From Istanbul, crossing the Mediterranean, to Mexico, the Río de la Plata, and circling back through Antarctica, this journey not only reveals showcases the richness of musical expressions shaped in transit but also the adaptation and artistic evolution that emerge from cross-continental interaction.

The artists—María García Ibáñez (Spain/Mexico), Álvaro Porras Soriano (Valencia), Volkan Diyaroglu (Istanbul/Berlin), Matías Ercole (Buenos Aires), Amparo Tormo (Valencia), and Manuel Vilariño (Galicia)—are situated in the exhibition space as a journey tracing a cartography of maritime and cultural routes between the West and America, starting in Valencia.

Álvaro Porras (1992, Ciudad Real), resident artist of the gallery, and Eduardo Barco (1970, Ciudad Real), guest artist, join forces to shape the exhibition “En este lugar donde nada es mío,” a project that proposes a dialogue between the works by Porras and Barco, two artists who are exploring the linguistic power of abstraction.

Inspired by the poem Maldito yo by also from Ciudad Real, Dionisio Cañas (Tomelloso, 1949), the exhibition includes a series of exercises that evoke a complex relationship with the landscape and the construction of belonging that derives from it, like the first verse of the poem: "In this place where nothing is mine, not my life, not my death..."

The text of the exhibition is the work of Álvaro de los Ángeles: (…) in the artists there does not seem to be mourning, nor nostalgia for loss, nor resignation in the face of what has come before or what is to come. Rather, it emanates, in the sculptural pieces or in the canvases of both clearly personal and differentiated, the confirmation of an imaginary that combines the crossed gaze of sophistication with the frontal one of that which is simple and direct.

“The alter ego took my hand and brought me here”In this exhibition proposal by Jorge López Galería, Gema Polanco (Valencia 1992), introduces us to her world on a journey to introspection that reveals and honors our vulnerability, addressing self-care and health (mind-body) as a transformative journey towards the metamorphosis that self-knowledge requires. Here we talk about the rawness and the struggle to find peace in our minds, to break those destructive patterns that, often without realizing it, become embedded within us as a defense mechanism. In an act of brutal honesty, the artist creates suits of mutation, in which intuition and desires intertwine to build refuges, spaces of possibility, self-care, struggle and resistance. 

These costumes and spaces invite us to enter, to embrace what we have kept silent about, to travel that path that leads us to self-knowledge. Gema Polanco in “The alter ego took my hand and brought me here” screams, casts self-spells from the depths of her being, with all her contradictions. She invites us to join in, to shout alongside her, to mend and sew our wounds, to go through them, to embrace them to finally inhabit them. Let's lay together the foundations of a shared and own cosmic launch platform, where new forms of care - honest, accessible and peaceful - are possible. 

The alter ego took my hand and brought me here. It has come through the cracks, as if it has been biding its time. That mutation suit has merged with “Her”, the artist, and is now part of her being. It moves with an almost ghostly lightness, dragging behind it tendrils that lengthen and twist, wanting to be tentacles of some ancient sea creature. They slide and rise, and along their path figures appear like the teardrop and the star/flame, obsessions from their adolescence, born from the made-up silhouettes of Black and Glam Metal.

It is fascinating how graphite on paper and black and white photography, despite their apparent opposition, converge on an essential point. Two extremes that, instead of repelling each other, meet at a secret point, a kind of aesthetic conspiracy. The intriguing thing is that both operate in the realm of absence, of the unsaid, of what is barely hinted at, as if they were writing in a secret language, a writing made of silence.

There is a curious symmetry in the confrontation between graphite and black and white photography, as if both forms of art were reflected in an infinite mirror, where opposites do not cancel each other, but rather complement each other in an essential enigma: the writing of the silence, the translation of emptiness.

Joan Cardells' graphite, that black and elemental line, is not just a line on paper; It is a shadow that has decided to stop. It is a line that, by a whim of fate, refuses to move forward, containing within itself a scream that does not dare to come out. There is something fascinating in that silence, in that dark trace that, in reality, is light in its purest and most essential form. It is the shadow frozen in time, a petrified scream on the surface of the paper, an echo that persists in its muteness. As in Borges' mirrors, it is a trail of darkness that, in its contradiction, is also the purest form of light.

On the other hand, Manuel Vilariño's photography, writing of light in its most literal meaning, captures the moment in which the shadow seems to surrender. The light is deposited on the sensitive surface, but what is truly revealed is what is not there, what the light cannot touch. It is the paradox of the frozen moment: the more intense the illuminated areas, the more unfathomable the silence of the shadows becomes. These act as a mirror that reflects the moment when blackness seems to give way to light. But what really captures is not the light, but the shadow, what is outside the reach of the light. And it is there, in that paradox of the stopped moment, where photography becomes a light trap that traps the invisible, what remains out of focus.

There is something almost magical in these works, in those figures that are barely outlined in a stroke or in that light that, when overflowing, leaves behind an unbreakable shadow. It is in that intermediate space, in that no man's land where shadow and light intersect, where the work of Cardells and Vilariño meets and dialogues without words, in a language made of absences, of voids that, suddenly, transform in presences.

Drawing with graphite and photography are, basically, two ways of writing about nothing. Cardells casts a shadow; Vilariño catches a light. But both sculpt and model that emptiness that, in its own denial, becomes something tangible, almost palpable. It is a game, an artifice that, in its simplicity, hides infinite complexity.

Cardells' shadow drawing delves into the darkness to search for a truth that cannot be seen in broad daylight. The absence of color is a strategy, a trick to direct attention to what really matters: the structure, the form, that skeleton of shadows that gives body to reality. In that darkness, in that gray area, Cardells finds his own language, a language that speaks with silences, with suggestions that have more weight than any outright statement.

Vilariño, with his photography, does something similar, but in the opposite direction. It takes light, that light that reveals everything, and uses it to hide, to wrap the visible in a layer of mystery. His images, full of a serenity that seems to come from another world, emerge like ghosts from the darkness, not to scare, but to invite a state of contemplation, of reflection.

Cardells and Vilariño, in this game of shadows and lights, take us to a terrain where reality becomes ambiguous, where what matters is not what is shown, but what is hinted at, what is left out of the frame. "The Silence of the Shadows" is, then, more than a title, a kind of declaration of principles. A tribute to fragility, to subtlety, to that beauty that can only exist in the shadows, in the unsaid, in what remains to be discovered or, perhaps, will never be revealed.

Organized by 𝟭𝟴|𝟱𝟮 𝗕𝗶𝗼𝗵𝘂𝗯 𝗟𝗶𝗳𝗲 𝗦𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗔𝗿𝘁 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 and Jorge López Galería

“Origin. Where friction occurs” It is a collective exhibition that develops a project at Jorge López Galería where three artists are invited, Ximena Ferrer (Lima 1994, lives in Berlin), Simón Sepúlveda (Santiago de Chile 1989, lives in Madrid) and Pablo Bellot (Alicante 1976), to break the aesthetic lines that usually make up the programming of this room. This change generates friction and confrontations with the misunderstood and the unknown. When language reaches its limits, the relationship with it is exposed to new forms.

In this way the public can find unrecognizable records compared to what is customary in this gallery's programming. A programmed space, where logic is broken and confusion, a change of energy, friction occurs

“Origin. Where friction occurs” addresses issues of identity, migration, inequality and the creative potential of conflict. This exhibition project arises from collaboration with artists and seeks to generate effects that are contingent and unpredictable.

Ximena: Reflection through reflection.

He builds his work from stories and memories, whether real or invented. His paintings are sensitive and energetic scenes in which the characters look directly into the eyes of the viewer. Alternating attention through synthetic paint, she compares and adjusts expressions until they appear the same, creating a connection with herself through the appearance of a girl. Ximena mixes autofiction, visceral sincerity and the exaggerated dramaturgy of soap operas to capture scenes on canvas, choosing vibrant colors that reaffirm their existence.

Simón Sepúlveda: The social observer

He configures his work as an observer, capturing human expression through different scenes of protest, parties or everyday relationships. His paintings break the logic of perspective, representing a space where we all intersect and are intervened by others. His works, bright and colorful, reflect his particular sensory perception and his relationship with people and the environment.

In his work he addresses political, social and territorial milestones through domestic objects, combining ancestral and contemporary practices, digital and pre-Columbian codes, as well as elements of daily life.

Pablo Bellot: The materialization of sound and the inability to communicate

It presents a series of works where ceramics and sound amalgamate, capturing the precise moment of a scream. His ceramics materialize sound and make the immaterial visible, manifesting the impossibility of communication for the contemporary individual.

Abstraction in his work is not an evasion, but rather a confrontation with the unknown. Their ceramics make sound visible while drowning it out, creating a tension between communication and its impossibility.

"Whoever leaves home has already returned" is a project that explores the sense of belonging and appropriation of a place during displacement. It consists of the collaboration of two prominent artists: Javier Bravo de Rueda (Callao, Peru, 1989 - resident in Bilbao) and María García Ibáñez (Madrid, 1978 - resident in Mexico City).

The project addresses the notion of "dwelling" from various perspectives. Travel and distance reveal the idea of ​​home, reflecting a constant search for elemental structures that refer to a nomadic body. The artists dialogue with the space they inhabit, marking their own routes that are traced during the trip. 

In María's works, lines solidify through clay, turning the act of drawing into an exercise in demarcation. The installation acts as a drawing that maps space, using ceramic pieces as vital traces full of geographical potential.

For his part, Javier examines the phenomena produced by multiculturalism and material and immaterial accumulation. His work delves into cultural syncretism and the constant search for identity in an increasingly hybrid world. 

The project proposes a look in two directions: from Latin America to Europe and vice versa, as well as from Europe to Latin America, generating a multicultural dialogue and a clash of perspectives.

Constant research, both theoretical and technical, of new materials is fundamental in the practice of both artists.