[spectre] and this weekend, what's hot?

[nilo casares]

http://comisario.net/sum/ivam_folleto_sustratosEN.pdf


show: _sustratos_

curator: nilo casares

technical coordination: irene bonilla

organization: ivam

venue: sala la muralla del ivam ( http://www.ivam.es | http://goo.gl/maps/tikeS )

schedule: [28.11.13) (23.02.14]

artists: eduardo arroyo, alberto bañuelos, carmen calvo, joan cardells, teresa cháfer, alberto corazón, ramón de soto, erró, christopher makos, natividad navalón, miquel navarro, vicente ortí, jose antonio orts, vicente peris, julio quaresma, sanleón, fco. sebastián nicolau, javier velasco, bernar venet, j. mª. yturralde, juan carlos rosa casasola, paola ruiz moltó, señor cifrián, mar domínguez, regina quesada, irene grau, trashformaciones, jimpunk, marie-lou desmeules, andrea gussi, marcos juncal, samuel ortí, für alle falle, salvia ferrer, carla cruz, daniel grijalba, solimán lópez, rocío garriga, eva and franco mattes, volkan diyaroglu


:::::::::::::text of catalogue:::::::::::::


two pair without discards

richard: (...) you may be his more than mine.
bertha: i am not. only i feel for him, too.
richard: and i do too. you may be his and mine.
i will trust you, bertha, and him too. i must. i
cannot hate him since his arms have been
around you. you have drawn us near together.
there is something wiser than wisdom in your
heart. who am i that i should call myself master
of your heart of of any woman’s? bertha, love
him, be his, give yourself to him if you desire – or
if you can.
bertha (dreamily): i will remain.
richard: goodbye.

joyce, j: exiles

the figure of two pair exists in poker, a position in the game in between a pair and three of a kind. i like this form, because without being anything specific, it doesn’t unpair the pair, which ultimately is just one which you go nowhere with, and it saves you from the nightmare any trio implies (in that sense, the spanish proverb “three is a crowd” is totally right) and that is why in this exhibition we have followed the principle of pairing one with another without discarding anybody. this might seem extremely difficult, or the opposite, given the ivam’s extensive collection. therefore, sustratos is an exhibition with an easy start off which ends as a complete carousel, helped by the architectural nature of the hall, which encourages the viewer to stroll around it rather than to visit it clockwise or counter clockwise, and by the endless collection the ivam holds.

this initiative promoted by the ivam’s management, to highlight the work of artists not present in the collection due to their age in contrast with others present in it, has the intention of shedding light not only on its collection and on what goals valencian art has accomplished, given that we consider the best is yet to come, and it will from elsewhere. that’s why when i enter the exhibition i do so as a resident of valencia which is not from here, status which allows me to focus on the diverse origins of all artistic expressions, but also on the artists themselves.

people and goods have been arriving at the gulf of valencia for ever and from everywhere. some stay, others nourish on what is here and then leave, quite a few come and go in a pendulous relation with the city which is beneficial for all, while others are born and take off because they can’t find their place here. there are many more ways of establishing a link with a place, so we should not forget about the high prestige of both of valencia’s greatest artistic institutions, its faculty of fine arts and the ivam, not to forget its early tradition for contemporary art galleries, which appears to be gathering momentum again, to put us all once more in orbit.

between one thing and another, an institute of modern art can not ignore the fluctuating relations of many artists who are not originally from valencia, but are valencian now, or have been some time. in the same way, the ivam’s collection does not limit itself to artists of valencian origin, because it would infringe upon its fundamental obligation of extending our sensitivity to spread it and acquire knowledge on what the world has been and what is happening within it.

the exhibition also tries to reveal the ever present filiations in art because, nihil sub sole novum, for a long time, museums were places of artistic pilgrimage. in them, people with a desire to learn from the masters would gather and then try to repeat their teachings away from the workshops which they had no access to. now a day, that role is not only carried out by museums and fine arts faculties. temporary exhibitions can also mark the careers of forming artists, or even of those already well established, in the same way daily coexistence determines the path to follow.

all of those things are behind lifelong art works, as in today’s, and they can be found in the pairing established here to drive the visitor through a vision of present art linked to valencia through artist that may not be here today, but were in some time, or they are no longer going to be here because they have the opportunity to develop their work elsewhere, and they go on with their lives as we all do.

in this introduction i will not mention any of the artists in the collection, because due to their status they are already widely known, and given the main objective of sustratos is to give way to new works created by new artists, i will focus on them.

the pairing was sometimes made by the connection with the country of residence of the work present in the ivam, and taken as an excuse to display the work of artists which connection with valencia does not exist.
it happened with the work of eva and franco mattes, exhibited at the punto gallery in the year two thousand and two in a display titled punto.dot with the intention of reflecting the digital art being developed at the time. in that occasion this pair, back then a group, would sign 0100101110101101.org. this movie is shown due to their current status of new york residents, like the artist with whom they are matched. let them believe (directed by todd chandler and jeff stark, with the help of ryan c. doyle and steve valdez) documents a complex project, plan c, where they entered the city of chernobyl equipped with all types of protection to avoid radioactivity and dismantle part of the junk they found in this modern pompey. part of the wreckage was smuggled into the united kingdom and used to build a merrygo-round, to contribute to the peace of a public park in london which did not have that specific ride we all enjoy, in a non central part of the city. the links between the mattes and appropriationism, provocation and the denouncement of stupid situations, even in our own late history of art, is well known.

another unrepentant appropriationist, related to this because of his
condition of paris resident (or that’s what i believe, because nobody knows anything about this artist), the city where the author lives and relates his work to, is jimpunk, an artist belonging to the beginning of net.art who utilises all sort of digital browsing tools in all of its forms, both 1.0 internet as well as what are known today as social networks (or 2.0), to establish a discourse in which noise prevails to make us understand there is nothing beyond that, and that we are caught up in junk through which we think we are making decisions which are no more than, as usual, decisions taken by others (a click on a screen to take you elsewhere would be its most banal form, eliminated by the artist from the beginning). the work displayed, trptch 01011, is a hurl without concessions captured on the 14th of may of 2011 amongst many others released by the internet everywhere. within these images, we can find some created by the author, but the grouping itself is a pure mix with no sense whatsoever, the same as everything we can find on the internet, which we feel belongs to us and is here to liberate us.

appropriationism, taken to the imitation of behaviours, can be found in carla cruz’s work, which has no other connection with valencia than being portuguese, like her partner. the work exhibited, an edition of three thousand post cards which can be taken home by visitors as a reminder of this brave act, shows the performance ser artista em portugal é um acto de fé (being an artist in portugal is an act of faith) carried out in 2003 when the artist jumped off the don luís bridge (porto, portugal) with a male haircut into the waters of the douro river to prove her courage as an artist after jumping from such height. one can understand the work better after realising the habit porto youngsters have of jumping off that bridge to prove their manhood and to boast about their courage with the rest of the kids. with this performance, the artist wants to prove she is as brave as them, if not more, diving into the world of art with no fear. right now, nobody will doubt of the critical feminist position of the artist, although in her case, she is not only so by means of her attribution of genre roles, but she delves in the possibilities of a truly democratically perceived art. this is why you can carry her great feat home from this exhibition.

but let’s come closer by the hand of juan carlos rosa cassasola from benidorm, which is something similar to being from nowhere (i have a friend born in las vegas who says the same). it is enviable to be from a place which distinction is not having any, perhaps that is why his work is so unprejudiced and aware of current affairs, because lo importante es con quién compartes el plato, no de qué está lleno, xxv (what is important is who you share your plate with, not what is it full of, xxv) belongs to a series which again goes over the great quantity of junk with which we socialise, but through traditional representation techniques, a non petty fact given that by means of twodimensional representation we can deeply analyse what does each of the icons mean (and not only the little icons representing junk’s utility, but also the du jour stereotypes) delivered to us by those devices with which we live (you know, social networks or 2.0). so, what good is it to know this is wrong, that is worse and that other thing is great, if you don’t know the people with whom you share topics and icons more than in a superficial way, that is, twodimensional, which is the pictorial break with which the artist stops so much freneticism.

the reality we are in puts aside the real nature of things. this is why paola ruiz moltó comes to our rescue from alicante, prioritising a reflection on emptiness and absence, which is a concern characteristic to sculpture, in the same way our relationship to space is too. it would be interesting to investigate what came first, architecture or sculpture; there is no doubt for this artist, given that she positions herself in some sort of “archisculpture” (her expression) with which she solves all those conflicts, rising over ancient thinking to oppose the hardness of a rock with the caress of a hand. while one is straight forward, the other offers thousands of possibilities, allowing the artist to afford luxuries such as ploughing wheat fields in the dry plains of an exhibition hall; because with this nature (not present in rooms, because architecture, as man’s direct creation, is always opposite to nature, and in this artist’s case, under the form of soft “archisculpture”) she bridges the gaps with a world nobody is able to get off of within the speed of light which surrounds us. therefore, the refugio (refuge) which leads us here is as true as necessary.

although not everything is nature, a bit of composure is never a bad idea. we know elegancy is at odds with naturalness since uncle oscar (wilde, of course) roams through life. in that sense, señor cifrián’s work, a pair of women concealed beneath the title of señor (sir), to complicate reality with endless misunderstandings. the first of which is: what is being represented here? the work of these artists is a permanent delve into representation techniques, with processes ranging from pure photography to the fixation of smoke remainders, as if they issued signs of the existing distances between things and their signals. furthermore, this is shamelessly manifested in this occasion making it explicit, like with the work perenne (eternal), an installation composed by what they call a placard, which is a succession of geranium petals used in the making of a delicate men’s shirt collar (once again, the word game with their condition of señor) made of paraffin once used for the creation of a photography series with this collar as an object of representation, which can have elements added to, and now put in by those who enjoy it, with whom to enquire what it’s all about.

clothing is not only a vehicle for elegancy, it also protects us from a hostile environment, a second skin, or even scales with which to submerge ourselves under the sea. this part investigates the work of mar domínguez, who besides being an artist is also an experimented scuba diver. without this addiction her work could not be understood. i have been a scuba diver, so i am fully aware of scuba divers passion for taking pictures of the sea floor and its fauna, kind of like how a cruise tourist will punish you with sea excursions once he is back. but this is not the case, we are not before a sunday day-tripper addicted to the showing off of his grouper nor the sighting of an octopus, no, it is about a process of introspection on the condition of being under water and breathing, it is something i had never encountered until i witnessed the work of this artist. whenever you see an exhibition of under-water art you face clichés. now the reflection is about the relation with a hostile environment, for which you equip yourself with cutting edge technology and you escape unharmed from impossible under-water flights, and all thanks to equipment without which respira (breathe) could not exist, to which she superimposes her father’s lungs when he was not at his best.

oparin places the origin of life in what he called an original breeding ground, which is nothing but the sea, where the first living proto-organisms he named coacervates were formed. something similar to those coacervates are the primitive beings presented to us by regin quesada, and generically called le primitif (primitive). these beings created with primary elements such as graphite and resins, very delicate and sensitive to light, temperature and touch. they are outlined randomly in the same way coacervates were dragged by tides (or that is how i want to picture it) and casually bumped in to each other. as a consequence of these encounters, more complex forms were created, and if we pick up on oparin’s thesis, we could find ourselves beginning as little pure coacervates. let’s replace our original breeding ground and coacervates with the artist’s hand and the paper it lands on, to follow her creation process until we encounter these very fragile beings, to such an extent they require maximum protection to be exhibited, and we will finally discover the jigsaw puzzle of a pregnant subconscious of intuitions which are close to the surface of the drawing fingers.

the original breeding ground had a feature we should not forget: it was warm. and there can be no warmth without a light radiating it. all of irene grau’s paintings are based on this light. whoever faces her work magenta, amarillo y cian (magenta, yellow and cyan) can feel baldness considering this installation as painting. the artist’s whole process of analysis is about the real being of painting, driving her through a path, with no apparent return, of immersion in the nature of light. if one stares carefully, and even more in such a radiant city as valencia, it will not be tough to realise shades have colour, the colour they receive from the objects over which light falls. sagacity in observation is what the artist wants to transfer to this installation created for this exhibition and which helps us to understand how the light emitted from three sources of basic colours gradually fill the space with colour. but not only three colours, but many more, because a shade is added to the first light, and another shade is added to the former, which is at the same time crossed with another, boosting the presence of colours occupying the whole two-dimensional space before us. it fills the wall and canvas with light because it is flooding it with paint, and for you to feel it better, stick your finger in.

light is not heavy, but paint is. but if something is undoubtedly heavy, it is metal scrap, and this is what the duo trashformaciones does, two scrap dealing brothers whose origin is the denial of the family business. in the beginning they proposed themselves higher goals such as architecture or industrial design. after giving up on those well considered careers, they returned to the family business to make it their own, although it was difficult for them to forget their second backgrounds, those which led them to give up on the family business the first time, and they flirted, once more, with industrial design, but through the reusing of things they would find in their family junkyard in almassora (castellón). after some time, they got rid of their complexes and they fully dedicated themselves to the production of artistic pieces, taking advantage of the techniques of scrap regeneration, starting to look at it with different eyes. it is as if all of a sudden the product of their work acquired a new texture as it was observed under the perspective of self distancing, perhaps because they understand bertolt brecht’s alienation effect technique, allowing them to allocate the skin rank left for drying at piel 25, piel 26 y piel 32 (skin 25, skin 26 and skin 32).

skin we submit to more than a thousand treatments to always feel beautiful, example of which is plastic surgery, being spain the leading consumer of these procedures in europe. one of marie-lou desmeules’ lines of work, a quebecois currently living in valencia, is what she calls painting surgeries, complex performance processes under which she submits a model to different procedures of pictorial and sculptural manipulation, in an ephemeral way, until she reaches a final result of true ugliness, but with the critical intention of questioning physical beauty role models in which we live and for which we are willing to do anything. these performance developments have a lot to do with her role as a dj, which is how i met her when she came to valencia, in a very cabaret like staging. but her beginnings in art were linked to acrylic painting, and it was thanks to her discovery she decided to jump head first into painting. in her series pizza art acrylic is the main character, and furthermore, in it she pays a tribute to many of the beauty models since the years of the golden age cinema, although if one stands out over the rest that is kate moss.

skin, nails and hair contain our dna and a trace of our beauty. two centuries ago, art questioned that beauty standard, and in the vienna of the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, a common ground to highlight the main character where sigmund freud situates his unheimlich (what is unfamiliar) as a cornerstone of his reflection on that time’s society, being responsible for artists such as egon schiele to question beauty from painting to face us with not very healthy and extremely deteriorated models, just at a time when austria was suffering the highest amount of tuberculosis in its history. in that moment, beauty standards are torn apart and art starts looking another way. however, outside our artistic sphere, beauty keeps on being associated with health, and especially with youth. this is the context in which the mexican artist andrea gussi was brought up (who lived in valencia during four years while she studied a fine arts postgraduate), moving to ciudad juárez for personal reasons and finding herself involved in the massive feminicide of teenage girls whose only responsibility was their beauty, having the artist no other explanation, or there being any. trying to show this without being too obvious is the challenge undertaken by gráfica del desierto (desert graph).

whoever is expelled from the education system encounters the wasteland, because there is no place in it for freestyle and wilful expression, there is no use in going with the flow or really liking colour fields, the only thing useful is to bow down to the faculty’s orders which function in a galley slave type manner. this was the feeling daniel grijalba had as a kid while he ran through the classrooms like a deer fleeing from a hunter who only considers you the best of his targets. passionate impending painter, his mother stimulated every single bit of joy she saw in her sun (i also had a very indulgent mother, so i can very well understand the complicities gathered throughout his personal growth), whoever feeds on a passion can only see the worst in school, which is here to tame us. so let’s call it quits, which is what this artist decided from a very early age. however, something deep inside was dragging him. if abstraction is something besides the best reflection of the desert we are in, there is no doubt the force driving you to lay on the pictorial surface the entire expressive load you carry everywhere, these are his luces y sombras (lights and shades).

for i who come from a fertile place, i always associate wastelands, barrens or deserts with a silence in which there are many more shades than lights. yes, it may be contradictory, but sometimes contradictions are like measuring rods. the collection of silences is somehow distressing because it ends up imposing itself over situations with the weight of an unbearable load. rocío garriga must think something like this when she is dedicating all her efforts to “silence and its ruins” (according to what she has told me), exponent of which is the work un año en minutos de silencio (del 28 de agosto de 2011 al 28 de julio de 2012) (a year in minutes of silence [from august 28th 2011 to july 28th 2012]), revised by this exhibition with a 2013 version to make even more explicit something i am highly interested in. there are dead links on internet we cannot say anything about. the content of the work is the sequence of every minute of silence announced from the alerts system of the eternal search-engine we all use to feed ourselves with information. yes, google. during the dates indicated in the title the artist punctually registered them, today many of those links are dead, like the silences through which the alerts were issued, in a constant movement with no space for guilt.

who was he? how can i find him? that is why we have the most sophisticated investigation techniques to help us find who is responsible, and if i don’t have enough with what i see, i keep on going and follow his track to find and capture him, if not red-handed, at least with the mess of leaving his fingerprints, because not everything is evident and many of the leads we leave are hidden at first sight, like proven by a part of solimán lópez’s creations grouped in a selection of works from the series user fingerprints, corresponding to part of the production this digital artist, recently installed in valencia, dedicates to what is behind, the backdoor in computer terminology. there is a strong interest within a part of digital artists in denouncing what is done to us and we don’t see because big brother (and there is more than one, in the same way there is more than one power which is the power) registers every bit of information to always use it against us, to the extent that services to clean up our public history on the internet, on big brother, already exist. well then, long before the existence of internet, we were already leaving our footprints all around.

that is why they know about us and we can end up in prison. salvia ferrer got into movies because she went to her grandmother’s house one day and she was fascinated with the colour tv the lady owned. that day she decided to make movies, and she put all of her effort into them. as chance would have it, she saw herself involved teaching a class to female inmates in prison. but not satisfied with that, she also learned from her students and submitted them to a therapy which was highly fruitful for all. she convinced a number of inmates to start a makeup and face-lifting process to make them feel something more than social outcasts getting what they deserve. in front of the camera she turned them into stars and treated them as such for them to tell the stories of how they ended up in such a sordid place, and select, because not everyone gets to go into a place like that, but not desirable, as the picassent prison is. full of light from the cameras and the makeup, they tell us the reasons for their incarceration and we end up discovering their double condition of victims, of a system which condemns misdemeanours and of a society which submits women to men’s whims, all of which we only find out when we dedicate them unos retratos de luz (light portraits), as if we were taking them out to party.

for parties, the one brought to us by marcos juncal, artist whose contact with valencia was very superficial limiting himself to an attempt to live in this city, he lives in london today, and to use mr. pink gallery as a catapult, where i saw a hilarious exhibition by him. because if something is proper to this artist’s work, is the cunning adjective which invites us to laugh until we choke. i would like the readers to picture a real size thurible (this artist is galician) made up of little disco ball mirrors from the seventies, titled discofumeiro (discothurible), and that is all i have to say to introduce ourselves in his work. it is not surprising he ended up in london surrounded by the funny young british artists, although it is also worth noting that he first studied in the prestigious school of classic sculpture at the poio monastery, where he shared classrooms with those who raised santiago de compostela’s cathedral with the technique of fine stonemasons. his chupe-tín, a huge baby’s dummy made out of polyester, leather and steel which makes us imagine a party of leathermen, let’s see who behaves worse, and of course, is more playful. his work is a succession of non visible linguistic trompe l’oeils in which he mixes anything for it to be immortalised in a laugh.

part of für alle fälle’s work is also very funny (she is from a coruña and he is from valencia, where they met studying fine arts), very inclined towards action art and performances. amongst works that can give us clues of their career we find the setting up of a basketball tournament, torneo passión (passion tournament), in which the players themselves decided what plays to carry out and invited anyone to participate, especially if they were not invited, and their goal was not to win, taking the principle of “what is important is to participate” to the real playing ground, because sport is not a game, it is a war through different means, and the only goal of this tourney was to play, to have fun. fervent militants in junk culture, they experienced a parallel education to university amongst the squat houses and the worst bars in town, and they can both create a work of art or punish you with an 8 bit concert. the principle of dismantling the rules of the game just to see what happens is transferred to this exhibition through el entresuelo (mezzanine) (created with the collaboration of dio3stu, and now reutilised), a sounding sculpture that can be touched by anyone and built with the left over circuits from different little pieces of junk: touch, touch.

samuel ortí is also a friend of these little pieces of junk, and he likes putting them together. he wanted to be an inventor, but his condition of artist’s son played against him, so despite trying to follow a serious path such as engineering, he listened to his genetics and got into fine arts, although he received his main education from his father, whom he helped in his workshop since he was a little kid. his father is vicente ortí, and i haven’t met a single student of his which had something negative to say about him, so i am not going to ask his son. this artist, i mean the son, decided to make his own works very late, and when he did, he did so in a curious conjunction of his childhood wishes, his abandoned engineering studies and his vicarious tasks in his father’s workshop, a proven master in the treatment of stone. as a product of all of this we have works like mechanical shock which start in the severity of stone or steel, to acquire automatic mechanisms granting that rigorousness with an unimaginable movement. in that sense, they are technical wonders ranging between heaviness and lightness, between sculpture and the desire of being the toy every adult who has not given up his boy dreams expects.

the istanbul artist volkan diyaroglu appears with a different mechanism (after arriving at valencia as a guinea pig, given he was the first turkish artist with a grant by his government to come study here). large format painter, he stopped playing conceptual by the shores of the bosporus, where he started his studies of fine arts which he would conclude in valencia, place where conceptualism is in daily menus compared to his city where it is something rare only present in the most exquisite restaurants. he handles himself amongst paintings like a mackerel in the marmara sea, because he keeps, from his conceptual and performist past, an obsession for getting full of paint, like everyone who paints on the ground, and not seeing anything. in this occasion his apocalyptic kebab is exhibited, expressing perfectly not only the situation his country is in, which republican virtues are in a clear set-back due to the reactionary ideas of politicians blinded by their religious beliefs, but the whole world, because wherever we look we encounter set-backs in the illustrated values which have made us good people.

and all of these works exhibited in the basements of the ivam, in la sala de la muralla hall, where the city started, gives a greater sense to the art which consumes itself to remain alive. i encourage the tracking of the artists that have been selected on internet, using google, or not.

shyr she’s nearly as badher as him herself. who? anna livia? ay, anna livia. do you
know she was calling bakvandets sals from all around, nyumba noo, chamba choo,
to go in till him, her erring cheef, and tickle the pontiff aisy-oisy? she was? gota por
yssel that the limmat? as el negro winced when he wonced in la plate.

joyce, j: finnegans wake (198.9-14).














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copyleft (todos os direitos ao reve's) nilo casares


a vida e' muito curta para beber vinho mau / la vida es demasiado breve como para beber mal vino / life is too short to drink bad wine / la vita e' troppo corta per bersi un vino scadente / het leven is te kort om slechte wijn te drinken / zivot je kratak da bi se pilo lose vino


meu nome e' casares, nilo casares, comissa'rio cri'tico de arte 9.0; a servico sempre:: mi nombre es casares, nilo casares, comisario cri'tico de arte 9.0, siempre de servicio:: my name is casares, nilo casares, 9.0 art critic curator, always on duty 

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