Exposiciones 2023

At PAPER Valencia, Jorge López Galería presented the project “Opuestos complementarios” (Complementary Opposites) with two artists, Manuel Vilariño (A Coruña 1952), winner of the National Fine Arts Prize in Photography and representative of Spain at the 52nd Venice Biennale, and Matías Ercole (Buenos Aires). Aires 1987) a young Argentine artist awarded the New Talents Award at Drawing Room Lisboa and selected by Chus Martínez to participate in ARCO Lisboa 2022 in a single Project.
The two artists share an exploration of nature and its representation through drawing. Although their approaches are different, they both have a relationship with light and paper.
Vilariño has been influenced by the golden age of Spanish art and the tenebrists, using only candles, a dim light, to illuminate the motifs of his works. Thus he manages to create extreme contrasts between lights and shadows, a dramatic and theatrical effect in the works of art that impact the environments and moods of the observer. The motifs vary from still lifes to desert landscapes precisely related to the poetic work of the same author. In his still lifes, Vilariño uses light in a very effective way to highlight the beauty and texture of objects, creating a sensation of realism and giving the photography "the magnificence of baroque paintings", the detail and the drawn atmosphere. Through the light in his images he transports the viewer to a world of poetry and natural beauty.
On the other hand, Ercole focuses on investigating how light has been presented in the history of art and removing shadows to highlight the light. He uses the paper as skin, a surface to tear at, making incisions and gently eroding the layers to reveal the interior. Ercole has effectively and skillfully developed sgraffito techniques to search for light.
Through small cracks, he manages to go from black or darkness to color or light, transporting us to scenarios that are reminiscent of theatrical and mythical lighting, with a great emotional and symbolic charge.
Both artists share space in PAPER in a poetic inquiry linked to the landscape and the history of art, a passion forged by light and poetry under the same plane: the present of the representation and its reminiscences, the evidence of what is represented and the implication (in the manner of a sign) of an absence. Nature and its evocation on paper, an alchemy of the artist and the material, a work that becomes a spiritual allegory.

Making it clear, painting (or at least that which uses its own critical root as a canvas, that is, which acts based on its tautology), has not managed, despite its attempts, to move away from the paradigms established during the modern project. Volkan Diyaroglu (Istanbul, 1982) starts from that same assimilation to propose an exercise of representation of his own pictorial mechanism. We have to say, therefore, that Diyaroglu paints exactly what he paints, so that, in Heideggerian terms, everything is evident to his own eyes.
In this sense, we understand that contemporary pictorial practice, in any case, is updated from the evolution of its own genealogy. It is as a result of this approach that aesthetic reforms, updated symbolic codes and the trademarks of contemporary visuality emerge. Starting from Volkan's work, we can propose a development of this method of representation, inheritance of late modern painting and its consequent crisis on the conception of visuality. On the occasion of the exhibition The first version was from another (2023), in Jorge López Galería, Diyaroglu presents a set of works that open three different fronts, all of them characterized by the mutations of the representation depending on the gaze that activates the painting.
The first of these fronts has to do with the multiplication of images in the ideal of their repetition, fundamental to trace the tangent that crosses the thought of three of the great postmodern authors – Deleuze and his Difference and Repetition (1968), the reflection which Foucault does as a result in Theatrum Philosoficum (1970) and the originality of repetition proposed by Derrida in Writing and Difference (1967) -. When Diyaroglu reflects on the eternal modern question as to what the image is, it is essential to understand it from an articulation of its discontinuities. When we confront The Big Other (2023), the state of his momentary mens alters the very notion of his visuality, giving rise to a change in our own contemplation of him as an image that repeats itself. The image, therefore, would resolve its difference according to the evidence of its own repetition. Perhaps for this reason, Diyaroglu alludes to the tautology of the image represented to clarify what the signifiers that cross it would be. If you ask him about his representation margins, he will tell you that his paintings are hyperrealistic images of those same paintings. The images of him are, then, assumptions of the natural.
On the second of these fronts, Diyaroglu will mark a genealogical interest in the ways of looking at painting. In the contemporary future, meaning and its frameworks of social truth would constitute new subjectivities, suggested by the hegemonies of knowledge and culture. Therefore, it is not surprising that Diyaroglu, faced with the paradigm of the visual image, makes an allusion, in his speech, to looking through screens. The essence of these screens, as a focus of repetitions, is the product in which a series of systems converge that, passing through the microchip, the military development of the Internet, television, satellite, telephone line or telegraph, They lead us to a radical basis argued in the dual perspective of the windows.
Diyaroglu's window, Selfportrait (2023) and Lost horizon (2023), is a two-way portal, in which the production of the visual resource looks while being looked at. This idea of sale dismantles, in the circuit of hyper-communication and digital surveillance, the essence of the work as an object, to question whether, in the being-image of the work, there is the event of its very visualization. The window, understood as a history of Western art itself, at least from approaches such as those of Marx Wartofsky [See: Sight, Symbol and Society (1981)], describes, while presenting itself, the reality of its own mirror image . The crystal-image, argued by Deleuze from his reflection on cinema, acquires a new significance, and thus could be elucidated in Watch 1 (2023) and Watch 2 (2023), when the optical image and its virtual reflection are crystallized not on its imaginary plane, but in the exchange and consequent updating of the perception of that image by the person who looks at it. In some way, the mirror would be represented by the mirror itself, and we are the ones who are in the middle point, looking askance at both ends of the representation.
This crystallization of the virtual image, contemplated through the historiographic window of representation, opens the third stage that Diyaroglu faces in this exhibition. It is in the artist's interest to ask what the painter's work is in the ellipse of representation from digital neoliberalism, forcing voluntary submission to the doctrine of the image. The image contained in Diyaroglu's canvases is the presentation of a disembodied voice. At the same time, contemplating it makes us participate in certain silences that are omitted in our search for constant information and meaning, accelerated by the digital paradigm that we are so tired of criticizing, but are so fundamental to us to structure our knowledge.
In some way, Diyaroglu's painting, within his own genealogy, once again asks us from where we have to look at it. This position, far from revealing to us a haptic approach to its form, leads us to develop a perspective marked by our knowledge of visualization. We can get as close as we want trying to find a falsifying narrative in the image, surely Diyaroglu has taken care of the detail and in his repetition exercise he has repeated the mistake. We could also zoom out as far as the gallery setting allows us to identify the constellation and material exchange between the pieces that make up the exhibition. But, from this text, we dare to advise that we accept the invitation offered to us to develop resources to look "through" the representation framework and thereby gain access to the original space of Diyaroglu's images.
Álvaro Porras

Jorge López Galería presents the first individual project of Álvaro Porras Soriano, after his participation in '[DOSMILVINT-I-U] [DOSMILVINT-I-TRES] = I encounter', an exhibition held at the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern (IVAM), and after the presentation at the Abierto Valencia of the exhibition 'Punk Beginning 2022', in our space.
'The password, our password' begins by raising tensions around expression and connectivity through symbolic elements. It immerses us in the pictorial representation to explore a reflection on the connection and the message, which in some way evokes the iconic. Thus, the project originates from the creation of a series of access codes for messages without description, without speech, without implication...
Pelé sings, on the guitar of Vicente Amigo, a Sevillian who is about a love that separates, and who, by taking distance, elaborates her own code as a withdrawn connection. As a narrative construction, like Pelé, Álvaro's work seeks to nuance a series of formalizations around the connective terms that can occur through a speech that, ultimately, is never pronounced.
The pictorial, in this project, acts as a series of coding processes that refer to several canonical terms of connectivity: the door, the bridge and the portal. Each of these elements offers a unique perspective on the relationship between the viewer and the work, as well as between the elements they represent.
The Door: as an entry and exit point, a threshold that separates the world from its continuity.
In 'The Password, Our Password', the door becomes a symbol of transition and transformation. It can be open or closed, suggesting the idea of opportunity and choice.
The door becomes a visual construction that challenges perceptions of what lies on the other side, inviting the viewer to question what is hidden behind this threshold and how it relates to the world itself.
The Bridge: as a symbol of connection and crossing. The bridge stretches into the distance and appears to have no defined end. Its pillars stand as support points, but the viewer never gets to see its true destiny. Again, rather than offering a clear connection, the bridge becomes an enigma that raises questions about continuity and direction.
The Portal: like a void that projects its exit towards an abyss of knowledge. It is a transition point into the unknown, a hole in reality that challenges our perception of what is possible. The portal, as a pictorial construction, immerses itself in the exploration of dimensions beyond the tangible, inviting the viewer to question the very nature of reality and existence.
'The password, our password' is built on these elements as a kind of pictorial materialization of a process and a desire for communication without a message, a paradox of the process of that which exists without its essential element. A void of discourse, where the communicative act is thus presented as a diminished reality. Each element raises questions about perception, transition and transcendence. Thus, the door opens and closes from the hinge of its equidistance with that which it connects, the bridge does not seem to end in any end beyond those points of the path where its pillars fall, and the portal is itself a void. that projects its exit towards a gnostic abyss.
The password, which seems to be ventured from the title of this exhibition, is something that is not provided at any point in the project.

DOOR
Three doors were saved from the fire and demolition; several no longer lead to where they used to lead.
On another remains an inscription that says: ________ The doors that traveled ventilate,
by saving they do not wear out, the sun does not shine on the wood.
See you down at the door,
at the door of the house, an open door,
You cannot put doors on the field.
When a door closes, a window opens: closed, with a sign, without a bell, with a mailbox, armored, glass, exterior.
The hinge keeps the distance
Now I'm coming down, I'm coming up now.
cross, cross
BRIDGE
A bridge connects one side and the other side, lays a path from one to another, It is vital to be able to make bridges,
cross to get out of one and go towards
Two shores and something that unites them.
Two near sides, two far sides.
A rope could be a bridge
when there are two holidays separated by a gap and they join together it is a bridge,
when you cross a bridge something changes.
The Rande Bridge.
A tunnel could also be a bridge,
A boat could also be a bridge.
Under the bridge is the abyss.
The pillars open the waters, they support the weight.
On the bills there are bridges, jumping off a bridge, living under a bridge.
PORTAL
The stairs that lead to the portal, the step of the portal that we like.
It is porous, lighter than dry and hard door.
A gap, a crack, an opportunity, a flicker, a hole,
a way out, a space of possibility,
a hole, an opening, the main door,
cross, cross
Text: Marina González Guerreir

Jorge López Galería presents five artists at ESTAMPA 2023: Alberto Feijóo, Volkan Diyaroglu, Victoria Iranzo, Álvaro Porras and Oliver Johnson.
The project is developed from dialogues and confrontations in the field of light and color, the interconnection between them derives from a generational approach; 2 artists born in the paradigm shift towards the digital world and the transformation of the image through the internet and two other digital natives. The project focuses on an analysis from language, of the pictorial, through paintings and photographs, investigating the way in which the emergence of the Internet and the massive consumption of images has affected our environment.
What is the place of the pictorial in an environment of image saturation, the recreation and creation of new paradigms from the image before the internet and post-internet.
What is the place of painting entering into the ephemeral nature of our contemporary reality. We will try to reveal these questions through light and color, inviting us to reflect on the connection between perception and understanding of the environment through the intention and persistence of painting as a medium.

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.