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Fonteta Teresa Solar

FONTETA – Bombon · Joan Prats · NoguerasBlanchard

Capítol I: Parar la fresca (To take in fresh air)

 

Opening: 18th-19th of June. Exhibition until 3rd of August

c/ Empordà, 10, Fonteta, Girona

 

June and September: Friday to Sunday, 5-9pm

July and August: Monday to Sunday, 5-9pm

or by appointment: (+34) 644 524 969

 

Text by Gabriel Ventura.

 

We’re delighted to present a joint project by Bombon, Galeria Joan Prats and NoguerasBlanchard, from June to September, in Fonteta, a small village in the Emporda region.

 

The exhibition, conceived in two chapters (the first opening June 19th and the second August 7th) brings together artists from three different generations. The proposal begins with a concept from the Emporda Parar la fresca (to take in fresh air) described by Josep Pla in the book “Las Horas”.

 

Parar la fresca, as Pla states, is the summer habit of taking a chair out into the street, or up onto a rooftop as the sun begins to fall and simply letting time pass. Parar la fresca has modest intentions, to ignore the heavens, to be blissfully unaware of what the sky offers us whilst sounds flow from the sunset and the summer heat. As Pla argues, there is nothing more pleasurable or kind than falling asleep in the fresh twilight. But what if one does not fall sleep easily?

 

Taking this question as a point of departure, works have been selected by artists addressing topics such as nature, landscape, time, contemplation, and the universe. They have been divided into two moments: Parar la fresca and Estar a la lluna. Two chapters of the same exhibition with artists such as Antoni Tàpies, Ana Mendieta, Joan Brossa, Hernández Pijuan, Rosa Tharrats, Perejaume, Teresa Solar, Jordi Mitjà, Aldo Urbano, Chema Madoz, Mari Eastman, Enric Farrés Duran, Wilfredo Prieto o Juan Uslé… amongst others. In addition, specific actions will be carried out by some of the artists linked to the Emporda.

 

In Pla’s words, “The vast sky dome, they say, invites us to think. That is true. But think about what?” The renowned Emporda author concludes that “people who have a sense of ridicule think, before the heavens, that they know nothing at all.”

 

 

* Capítol II: Estar a la lluna (Head in the clouds)

Lola Lasurt, Javier Peñafiel

Opening 15/5/2021 from 11am to 2pm

 

17/06, 18h30: Visit with the artists. + info

 

From the 15 of May, we shall exhibit the first collaborative exhibition by the artists Lola Lasurt and Javier Peñafiel, titled Desde hace tiempo que nuestras comunicaciones no vienen de un lugar reconocible [It has been a long time since our communications have not come from a recognizable place].

 

 

‘One in one, a transmission line.

 

For a long time, Lola and Javier have been working, imagining, drawing, describing, and reporting choreographies.

 

The fear of being contagious produced a reduction in contact, this fear both reduces and paralyzes at the same time.

 

To imagine co-immunities is a cry for help.

 

This is the point of the exhibition, the moment before the transmission. When the gaps in memory seem less passive, memory shakes them up. The memory of any place does not need the quantum to unfold.

 

We present a phrase/frieze, constructed from various completed works that is not a synthesis but an unfolding.

 

We are not simply one whole.

 

For a period of time Lola choreographed performances under water. Synchronized Swimming. The water has always been a place of choreography for both artists. Javier, personally affected by bone problems, is a disciplined swimmer of aquatic Chi Kung.

 

The conversation between Lola and Javier focuses on repeated figurers, unique ideas, personal dances, theater signs and the insubordination of the contexts.

 

Javier uses a phrase from a long time ago, for the things that are happening in the world, the removal of patrimony, changes, movements, the future. He refers to this step as Desactivo Domicilios (deactivated domiciles), the moment before the explosion, the prevention of the catastrophe, the unwritten chapter.

 

A phrase/ frieze of serial works by Lola and Javier extends over the gallery in form of a choreographed line.

 

Various works and videos accumulate in the main hall, ready for departure, unsure of when and at what speed, nor their exit strategy or shipping protocols.

 

Objects are most enigmatic when they are circulating.

 

‘I still remember when a change of residence meant the transfer of a (telephone) line, and it has been a long time since our communications have not come from a recognizable place.’

 

Ultimately, all transitive.’

 

Lola Lasurt and Javier Peñafiel

 

 

 

 

Lola Lasurt (Barcelona, 1983) lives and works in Barcelona. The gallery has collaborated with her since her individual exhibition Exercici de Ritme which took place in 2014.

 

Graduating in 2005 from Universitat de Barcelona, she completed two Masters in Artistic Productions and Investigation (2009-2010). Lola also trained between 2016 and 2019 at Royal College of Art (RCA). She showed her work at the Biennal d’Art de Valls (2009); Note Book KKKB, Barcelona (2010); Bienal de intervenciones site-specific. Alcontar, Almeria (2011); Auberge Espagnole, Anneessens Palace, Brussels (2013); Red Dawn, HISK, Ghent (2014); Young Belgian Art Prize, Brussels (2015); Foot Foraine, La Villete, Paris (2016); Daybreak, Royal College of Art, London (2017) or Generación 2018, La Casa Encendida, Madrid.

 

Amongst her latest exhibitions stands out Doble Autorització, Espai13, Fundació Miró, Barcelona (2014); Flag Dancing Moves, ornothing, Brussels (2015); Donació, Biblioteca Pública Arús, Barcelona (2016); Emissió Periòdica Definitiva, santcorneliarts(2), Cardedeu (2017) and Joc d’infants, La Capella, Barcelona. Currently her project Cardiograma is being shown at IVAM in Valencia.

 

Lola received an Exchange grant of Hangar and Greatmore Art Studios (2012); a grant of investigation of Sala d’Art jove of the Generalitat de Catalunya with the group Leland Palmer (2012); the Premi Miquel Casablancas, finalist edition mode (2013) and project mode (2015); a research and artistic scholarship of Generalitat de Catalunya (2014); the price Generación 2018, Fundación Montemadrid, La Casa Encendida, Madrid and the third price of the 15th Muestra de Arte Naturgy, MAC, A Coruña (2018).

 

 

 

 

Javier Peñafiel (Zaragoza, 1964). He was living in Barcelona from 1993 until 2020. He has collaborated with the gallery since 2004 presenting his first exhibition with a video called Confianza quería pentrar. In 2008 we showed his work in the exhibition No verbal. Todo escrito and in 2013 the exhibition Latido Antecedente.

 

After studying philosophy, Javier Peñafiel concentrated his work during the 1980s into ambits of system criticism. He formed himself outside of academic structures. In 1994, Manel Clot, curator of La Capella de l’Antic Hospital de la Santa Creu de Barcelona, offered him the opportunity to show his work for the first time at an individual show.

 

Since then, Peñafiel showed is work both at home in Spain and abroad: Conferencia performativa, MUSAC, León (2013); Languages and Aesthetics of Spanish Videos Art: Ten Years of Critical Practices, Videotape, Hong Kong (2015); VÍDEO-RÉGIMEN. Coleccionistas en la era ausdiovisual, Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid (2015); Cómo hacer arte con palabras, MUSAC, León (2016); Discursos Premeditats, Centre del Carme, Valencia; Bibliotecas insólitas, La Casa Encendidada, Madrid (2017); Walkabout #01, Fondazione La Fabbrica del Cioccolato, Torre-Dangio in Valle di Blenio, Switzerland (2018).

 

Furthermore, Javier Peñafiel has shown his work in individual exhibitions, Puente, continúa, Pabellón Puente, Zaragoza (2013); Egolactante, Sala Anilla, MAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo. Universidad de Chile, Santiago (2014); Pánico Esnob, etHALL, Barcelona (2015); Agència en avenir – No tots visibles res transparent, Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona (2017); ¡Más que pañabras, obras!, Instituto Cervantes, Bordeaux (2019) or Alrededores exentos de adultocentrismo, Casa Solleric, Palma (2020).

Opening 16.01, 19h

Exhibition 17.01 – 30.05.2020

 

 

On Thursday January 16, we will open the seventh exhibition of Chema Madoz at the Galeria Joan Prats. We will present recent works made between 2012 and 2018.

 

The black and white photographs by Chema Madoz are characterized by their sharpness and fineness. Simple objects of everyday life appear in his pictures. The photographer has manipulated them, often combining two objects, looking for associations or paradoxes. These sculptures created by the artist are born only to be photographed, always with natural light. The change of scale and the absence of color allow us to establish a distance and at the same time distort reality, questioning ideas such as the true and the possible.

 

In the images of Chema Madoz, therefore, two points of view converge, the one from the photographer himself and the one from the viewer, who faces photography from the same place from where he faced the object. In the words of Chema Madoz, he is interested in “the idea of finding, discovering and perceiving the mystery in everyday life.” At the same time, the artist conceives reality as an exercise of reading, and with a cold look, he documents the destruction of its rules through photography.

 

All the photographs are printed on baryta paper and sulfide toned.

Cabello / Carceller solo exhibition at Regelbau 411. Kunsthal for international samtidskunst. Thyholm, Denmark.

 

Opening Dec. 14 at 2pm.

Exhibition: December 14 2019 – February 16 2020.

 

 

Helena Cabello and Ana Carceller have been working together for three decades to exploring how particular body ideals and particular notions dominate our visual culture, how these notions create special kinds of representation, and how to offer alternatives to these notions.

 

The two bunkers in Regelbau 411 each present a video work that has been transformed into two site-specific video and text installations. The artists visited the art centre on Thyholm this summer and have since developed this special exhibition design.

 

 

+ info

 

Juan Usle, Ibiza

08.06.2019 – 31.10.2019

Museu d’Art Contemporani d’Eivissa

 

Juan Uslé

Inauguración el viernes 7 de junio de 2019 | Sala de Armas del MACE

Colaboran: Conselleria de Cultura del Govern Balear y AmicsMACE

 

Juan Uslé I Carbón y Maculares I 2011 – 2018 I Cartulina y técnica mixta I 56 x 71,2 cm. I Foto: Sergio Belinchón

 

+ info

Luis Gordillo

Museo Reina Sofia. Edificio Nouvel

Colección 3.

La obra de Luis Gordillo (1934) nace de una compleja síntesis de elementos diversos, provenientes del informalismo, el arte pop y las corrientes geométricas, fuentes que alimentan su obra de manera simultánea e intencionalmente contradictoria. Su síntesis pictórica se presenta como la constante deconstrucción y reelaboración de una imagen que se reblandece, desinforma y confunde en su apariencia incompleta.

 

+ info

Teresa Solar

Madrid, 1985

Lives and works in Madrid

 

 

Teresa Solar’s work focus on heterogeneous practices that materialize in audiovisual and sculptural works, in which the languages ​​of the two disciplines connect and interact. However, in recent years, her artistic practice has opted more for drawing and sculpture, with materials such as ceramics or clay, which have been used, since the beginning of humanity and until today, for their insulation properties, resistance and hardness.

 

Based on these elements, Teresa Solar’s work delves into the autobiography, alluding to the daily trips through the subsoil in the Madrid metro or injuries to her own body, to the concern for speech and the organs of phonation, and, at the same time, she reflects on wide-ranging themes, for example related to zoology, geology or space exploration.

 

Along with her interest in the materiality of clay and earth, another figurative language appears in Teresa Solar’s work that moves between the detail of scientific illustrations and the pedagogical representations of Natural History museums, and the brilliant coloring of the fairground attractions, which have resulted in works such as Cabalga, Cabalga, Cabalga or Flotation Line. These are large sculpture installations, which form families with pieces of different sizes, some of them monumental. At the same time, Teresa Solar is an avid sketcher who works with this technique to express her emotions more directly.

 

Lola Lasurt

Barcelona, 1983

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

Lola Lasurt’s artistic activity focuses on painting and video and many times also on collaborative processes that confer a universal projection, to her works of a more personal character.

 

The project about the ‘des-time’ can be understood as the analysis and the questioning of a time period, previous to hers. This is one of the main axis of her work, that frequently uses as a starting point elements from the material and aesthetic culture, that reveal behavioral patterns and ideological parameters of a determined era.  

 

Her pieces revolve around the themes of the memory and the oblivion, the nostalgia and the amnesiac need. Lola Lasurt is interested in the historical individual time and its relationship with the guidelines of the hegemonic culture and the construction of collective symbols.

Alicia Kopf

Girona, 1982

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

From the exercise of drawing and writing, Alicia Kopf reflects on apparently individual issues that have become generational concerns.

 

The expressive dimension of her work is related to her studies in Fine Arts and Comparative Literature, studies that allow her to get closer to subjects as diverse as poor housing or the epic of polar exploration from a position that combines both awe and ironic distance.

 

Alicia Kopf’s work arises from a metaphor, which allows her to perform an analytic exercise that will finally lead to different associations. Thus, in her project Articantàrtic, from the appropriation and the reshaping of graphical and narrative documents, Alicia Kopf turns a historical account into a first person narrative concerning resistance, obsession and the idea of conquest.

Luis Gordillo

Seville, 1934

Lives and works in Madrid

 

 

Luis Gordillo started his career during the fifties when he travelled to Paris and got acquainted with the European art of the time, in particular with artists such as Wols, Dubuffet, Michaux and Fautrier. In his first works the influence of surrealism and Tàpies can be appreciated to which an early seventies Pop art associated iconography would be incorporated in later years.

 

Gordillo becomes one of the permanently renovating painters of the pictorial language and one of the artists that during the early seventies reincorporate figuration. It’s likewise in that moment, when he starts to work with photographic images, that this, in some way or another, is introduced in the process of creation in his paintings.

 

Both ideas, that of the process and the continuous construction as resource of accumulation, are elements that are permanently present in his work.

Evru / Zush

Barcelona, 2001 (from 1946, Alberto Porta, and from 1968, Zush)

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

Alberto Porta adopts the name Zush in 1968 when he consciously initiates the creation of his own world parallel to reality. This world constituted by his artistic work is named “Evrugo Mental State”, which is a State such as a bubble territory.

 

In this state there even exists an alphabet called “asura”, a passport, a flag, ambassadors… His iconography is nourished by images that Evru/Zush has been elaborating from biographic elements: eyes, vital organs, fire, water, etc.

 

From the eighties, Zush incorporates new digital means to his work which boost the interactivity and the relevant role that the spectator assumes. His work aims –according to what he himself has commented in some occasions- to achieve harmony in art, science and mysticism, which would make possible to recover the balance present in childhood.

Victoria Civera

Port de Sagunt, Valencia, 1955

Lives and works between New York and Saro (Cantabria)

 

 

Victoria Civera’s career began in the seventies, working mainly photomontage. Over the next decade she focused on painting, abstract at first, but then introduced figurativism. In the middle of this decade Victoria Civera moves to New York and integrates photography and sculpture to her practice. Her creations undergo a transformation, making them more introspective.

 

Because of the iconography of her work, focused on the feminine universe, and because of her oneiric content, Victoria Civera has achieved a personal language, full of nuances. She moves in between large-scale pieces, in which she uses industrial materials, and suggested and poetic understatement pieces, often incorporating ordinary household objects.

Cabello/Carceller

Helena Cabello (Paris, 1963) and Ana Carceller (Madrid, 1964)

Live and work in Madrid

 

 

Cabello/Carceller’s work is set in a territory from which they question, reflect and/or fracture the roles or stereotypes associated to gender. They understand identity as something built in conflict or in consonance with a social, cultural, political and economic environment. They point at an `I´ that is always found according to the `others´, this idea vertebrates their production.

 

In their works the patterns, which are linked in a static way to either masculine or feminine roles, are revised. In this way, images are subverted in their works along with behavioral codes and attitudes, associated to that which is commonly considered as masculine or feminine.

 

The rereading that Cabello/Carceller’s work forms in the mentioned models, position the spectator facing multiple prejudice, assumed values and contradictions that manage to effectively destabilize a univocal vision of reality.

Alfons Borrell

Barcelona, 1931 – Sabadell, 2020

 

 

Alfons Borrell is one of the most prominent representatives of lyrical abstraction in Catalonia.

 

After attending the studio of Anglada Camarasa and the School of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi in Barcelona, Alfons Borrell began his artistic career in the fifties, within figuration at first. His work evolved into abstract expressionism and, already in the sixties, to the gestural painting.

 

In the mid-seventies he developed the style of its own, detached of any label, characterized by a sober chromatism that  is consciously disassociated from the material informality. In his painting, the color is imposed on the form, from a language that waives any reference, craving and seeking restraint and rigor.

Calella, Barcelona, 1963

Lives and works in Calella, Barcelona

 

Jordi Alcaraz’s work is a reflection on volume, artistic language and time through a lyrical handling of materials. An abstraction that is the result of the battle against limitations of format and conventions.

 

His work is based on the classical tradition of painting and sculpture and alters the meaning of the foundations of a real and recognizable object, to new genesis of meaning and continent.

 

Jordi Alcaraz transgresses surfaces and materials, gives unlikely uses to his pieces and redefines the logic of frames and methacrylate, of stones and plasters, of mirrors and woods, of shadows and metals; changing perceptions and conventional treatments.

 

He has done different bibliophile editions such as “El Viatge a Tokushima”, with text by Joaquim Sala-Sanahuja, or “Diorames”, together with Joan Brossa, Alfons Borrell, Perejaume and Jordi Rosés.

Madrid, 1915 – Galapagar, Madrid, 2007

 

Throughout his career, Pablo Palazuelo developed a very personal form of geometric abstraction linked to esoteric issues, Kabbalah, Eastern philosophy, along with mathematics, physics and scientific thinking.

 

Palazuelo, initially, studied architecture before deciding to devote himself only to painting in 1939. Later, he also ventured into the third dimension, producing sculpture from 1954.

 

In the 1940s, his work was influenced by the abstraction of Paul Klee, but in the early 1950s he began to draw inspiration from his readings of Theosophy and hermetic texts dealing with the connections between numbers, the sacred or the psychic, and the correspondence between sound and color, focusing on the language of geometric forms. For Palazuelo, geometry is at the origin of life and allows a view of hidden structures, potential new forms and the metamorphosis of one form in another.

Perejaume

Sant Pol de Mar, 1957

Lives and works in Sant Pol de Mar

 

 

Perejaume started to exhibit his work during the late seventies and since then he has been developing it in parallel, either in visual disciplines or in literary extension.

 

The landscape is a recurring subject analyzed and explored in his work, retaking and reevaluating the presence it has had most of all, in its literary and visual production. Through this approach, his relationship with the landscape is examined from diverse points of view none of which are exempt of irony. Points of view that are shaped through painting, sculpture, photography, installations, video or the intervention on the natural environment itself.

 

For Perejaume, man is part of the landscape, he isn’t an outsider to it and he is yet another agent in its conformation and evolution, as if the geologic time would have been accelerated.

Javier Peñafiel

Zaragoza, 1964

Lives and works in Mallorca

 

 

Javier Peñafiel’s work, drawings, videos, texts and sculptures make up a linguistic system parallel to a reality to which he is unconnected.

 

All through his career, Javier Peñafiel has built up a universe inhabited by characters; by sentences that work autonomously, such as phrases that have the duty to bother the quiet and routine based use of the language by the spectator; or videos where diverse elements are combined in the shape of tableaux, sharing a space but keeping at the same time their identity separate.

 

The works of Javier Peñafiel show the necessity and the difficulty in direct communication. His works investigate the double identity – as obstacle and as a bridge- that the language represents in such communication.

Ràfols Casamada

Barcelona, 1923-2009

 

 

Besides his long pictorial career which has boosted him internationally, Albert Ràfols Casamada has another creative side as a literary poet. It is of no surprise that his multidisciplinary character attracts him to teaching and pedagogy in the world of fine Art.

 

In his painting, modernity’s fragile equilibrium has been developed and maintained: his work, of classical origin, incorporates at the same time the legacy of the avant-gardes.

 

During the early seventies he abandoned figuration to work in the field of abstract painting that would take him, during the eighties and nineties, to develop a more lyrical abstraction. This process would lead to what is his most recognized stage in his artistic career.

 

On the other hand, Ràfols Casamada has had a fundamental role in the renewal of the arts teaching in Spain being the founding member of the Eina School in Barcelona in 1967.

José María Sicilia

Madrid, 1954

 

 

José María Sicilia was one of the most significant representatives of Spanish painting in the eighties who identified himself with the young generation of artists that at the beginning of that decade, took up the practice of a `material´ perspective in painting

 

From 1985, Sicilia initiates a new series of works on the subject of flowers, by which he is specially recognized in Spain. This new thematic development would take him deeper in an investigation focused in the analysis of the shape, the construction of space and the structure of light.

 

In the abstract painting that this artist has developed lately, the use of wax acquires a main role for its possibilities of dialogue with light and the creation of spaces in the pictorial surface.

Soñé que revelabas (Madeira), 2019

Santander, 1954

Lives and works in New York and Saro (Cantabria)

 

 

Juan Uslé´s painting is based on his urban experience, particularly New York, where he moved in the late eighties. Visual perception, liquid – so mobile and fluid – and light structures and spaces, greatly influenced him, bringing forth a combination of geometric elements and organic elements in his compositions.

 

Juan Uslé works mixing his own colors and applying them by dispersion on canvas, building abstract images from geometric patterns, light and color. In each of his compositions he combines the search of an organization and structure, along with the appearance of the unexpected.

 

The painting of Juan Uslé analyzes, rather than expresses, the origin of his own images based on the urban experience. His practice is based on the interplay between formal antitheses, and so his work is defined as opposing dynamics.