Author name: jorgelopez

Show me your depths; I will show you mine
Muéstrame tus profundidades; yo te mostraré las mías
It appropriates and allies itself with the aesthetics of punk, the rebellious, the spontaneous. It gives voice to a series of self-care proclamations through textile and installation pieces, giant banners, alter egos, thoughts, scales, disproportionate eye shadows, screams, body shakes and venting movements that become a metaphor for a refuge and scenarios of possibility and resistance.
Show me your depths; I will show you mine, invites you to go inside yourself and inhabit your dark and silenced spaces. It takes over codes and languages typical of Rock and the punk attitude, whose history can be traced from da-daism to situationism, an attitude revived in contemporary artistic production, taking up that attitude in a new moment, like noise, cut-out typography , anti-design and ugliness; or the inclusion of direct musical references. Denial, speed and lack of virtuosity is its leitmotif. “No future” was one of the slogans that punk appropriated from previous cultural movements, punk as an adjective that qualifies a way of understanding the world.
Show me your depths; I will show you mine, Gema Polanco's project for ARTE SANTANDER, is defined as the attitude of denial, opposition and destruction; the reference to fear and terror in a society that alienates individuals; nihilism; criticism of the economic system and anarchy.
Show me your depths; I will show you mine is a demand for a neo-sexual liberation, the body as a place of battle in a new artistic production that reveals the main elements that define the attitude of a new generation of artists as a way of understanding culture and, therefore, extension, of being in the world.
Show me your depths; I will show you mine highlight our feminine vulnerability, thus referring to self-care and health to talk about the transformative journey and metamorphosis that comes with self-knowledge and self-care. A cry of confidence and fatigue.
All embroidered pieces are made with a modified domestic sewing machine, allowing them to be used performatively, making a non-linear journey of simultaneous construction and deconstruction.
We are contradiction, “we are this and that”, we are complex, we are with others. We mutate, we transform and we look for a way to be true to ourselves, with the desire to leave behind care for survival or necessity as the only way of existence.

ARCO – Back-story

The project presents a vision of contrasts. Of Conflicts and dualities, on a slippery threshold between digital realities and physical realities.
From the solid with basic, pure and full forms of Amparo Tormo, to the liquid, flexible, digital and colorful of Inma Femenía, from the collected, appropriated, captured and superimposed image of Alberto Feijóo, to the painting of Volkan Diyaroglu trying to make tangible the world that exists beyond the screen, to overcome the snapshot with the immobility of the painting, as slow animations.
The term “Back-Story” is commonly used in cinema and journalism to tell everyday stories, to give background to an incident that is being told. It refers to the events that took place chronologically before the main narrative, before its exhibition in ARCO.
The backstory is revealed through “Exposition” of facts and background, such as a vision, a flashback, a staging.
The relationship of these 4 artists is a staging as a dialogue and confrontation where their works are contrasted, veiling and revealing the content from the different viewing angles of the stand, as if it were a backstory that can be revealed.
The relationship of these artists is presented as a harmonious parity, a staging, full of nuances and contrasts, like a prolepsis, like a project in development. The works are transmuted, revealing their formal and conceptual qualities of transparency, opacity, light, line, multiple, verticality, fragment and union, to transform into an almost liquid scene, fragile in constant tension and contrast. A staging where a fragment appears inopportunely here and there, to remind us of the era in which we live.
Back-Story invites us to finish a story; to delve into the delicate tension between the works of these artists, an experience between flexible and rigid materials, organic and industrial, fragmented or degraded, digital or physical, by dislocated discourses extracted from the lightness of everyday life.

Las Pendientes

Blues arrive
By Renata Cervetto
– The gorgons meet again…
– Yes, although I like to think more that they come back to look for us, to remind us that we are playing and that the rules are changing.
– It all depends on the mask we choose to use.
– And how we adapt collectively.
It has been several years since the Argentine artist Valeria Maculan jumped from the two-dimensionality of painting to enter space in an active and purposeful way. That decision opened a new playing field that led her to experiment with new materials – fabrics, ribbons, paper, wood, wire – with which she began to create ornamental objects such as crowns, thyrsi scepters and masks. In a natural way, the body and its possibilities appear: its structure, motor skills, and its capacity for representation. In Boneless (2017), for example, we are faced with a series of overlapping fabrics that hang vertically, suspended from their upper corners, resembling inert bodies without structure that float in space at the height of the viewer. Later, regaining weight and gravity, came the Skeletons (2019) and Shields (2021), capable of being activated manually to give them movement. The ability to be another (to personify) and, at the same time, to articulate ourselves as a collective body, are aspects that run through this series of works, along with the artist's marked interest in theater, Greek tragedy, automata and literature. of Science fiction. The Gorgons (2022), however, first appeared by playing with figures cut out of paper, painted and glued. Enclosed, pushing to get out of the margins imposed by the material itself, these articulated bodies seem to float within the pictorial space.
The representation of these characters, whether three-dimensional or from the painting itself, accounts for Maculan's visual training and her dialogue with the aesthetic currents of her native country. We could imagine a layout that begins with the study of the Harlequins, large-format oil paintings that Emilio Pettoruti made in the 1920s and 1930s. These bodies disguised as musicians and minstrels, faceted by planes of color on dark or imaginary backgrounds, knew how to show their resilience against those academic volumes turned from chiaroscuro. A decade later, Juan Batlle Planas – a Catalan painter living in Argentina – would recover this pictorial language and take it towards the surrealist trends that circulated in those years in dialogue with psychoanalysis. His tempera paintings and drawings reflect strange, geometric and masked bodies, which will also be protagonists in the works of his disciple Roberto Aizenberg. Finally, the works of the artist Líbero Badíi bring us machine bodies with two or three heads, dismembered and assembled in a playful and expressive way. Although his figuration borders more on the sinister and destabilizing, his sculptures approach those more-than-human bodies that, articulated by means of screws and gears, are deployed in a forceful way.
Questions about the body and its insertion in space resonate in the search of Maculan, who back in 2008 defined himself as “a creeper,” occupying floors and walls with plastic roots and plants that grew organically during the exhibition period. That expansive and humid matter is rearticulated today in The Slopes, bluish gorgons that shed all excess and gadgets. In fact, when you look up a little, they hang from the ceiling gracefully and expectantly. Hanging irregularly, they directly challenge us in an apparent chaos that, against all odds, appears to be under control. The tension between their apparent stillness and movement invites us to travel through them without pre-established paths, to occupy their space and dance with them in that erratic coming and going that their figures propose. Perhaps the next step is to imagine what subjectivity and agency these bodies have as they take on a life of their own, and what forms these unexpected collaborations will have in the environment they decide to occupy.
Renata Cervetto
(Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1985) Curator and researcher. She has a degree in Art History from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and carried out the curatorial program at the Appel Arts Center (Amsterdam, 2013-14), she was curator of the 11th Berlin Biennial, The crack begins inside, together with Agustín Pérez Rubio, Lisette Lagnado and María Berríos.