ABSTRACTION 2
ABSTRACTION 2
ARRÓNIZ
CONTENTS 09
Abstraction 2
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The Exhibition
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Works & Artists
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Arrรณniz Arte Contemporรกneo
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Credits
ABSTRACTION 2 Abstraction 2 aims to capture the current state of contemporary abstraction, highlighting the differences and similarities displayed in the artistic practice of fifteen national and international artists.
Featured artists: Iosu Aramburu - Peru Fernando Carabajal - USA Emilio Chapela - Mexico Jaime Gili - Venezuela Justin Hibbs - England Károly Keserü - Hungary Asger Dybvad Larsen - Denmark José Carlos Martinat - Peru Mario Palacios Kaim - Mexico Martín Pelenur - Uruguay G.T. Pellizzi - Mexico Ricardo Rendón - Mexico Saúl Sánchez - Colombia Dannielle Tegeder - USA Wolfram Ullrich - Germany
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THE EXHIBITION
WORKS & ARTISTS
Iosu Aramburu Peru, 1986
Aramburu’s practice is centred on an exchange of glances between Peruvian modernity and its internal conflicts, and the romantic observation of ruins. He works with archival images and texts mainly about the modern architecture boom of the 1940s and 1950s in Latin America, especially in Peru. He then collides these images with each other to create a series of new relationships that seek to reveal hidden aspects of the official discourses that loaded each image. He uses architecture as a clear example of the promise of a modernity that never fully arrives.
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Primera conferencia (First conference) / 2016 silkscreen ink and spraypaint on masonite 120 x 210 cm / 47.2 x 82.7 in 31
Fernando Carabajal United States of America, 1973
Arriving from different reflections on the idea of production and artistic product, Carabajal develops a personal questionnaire to resolve through concepts characteristic of art, beyond supports or specific media. His work is a field of action for the spectator. An observatory, an inventory. The work is not hermetic but neither immediate. It requires and is required, softens up when seen, solidifies itself at the sight. His interest is to proliferate —more than to explain— an interest for the questions. Try to make the spectator believe that we surely inhabit an enormous and indecipherable question, and as beings from that realm, we converse through questions, and not through answers with things. This correspondence and exchange could explain the diversity of appearances in his work. It is not a reflex of a pretentious question. It is evidence of the simplest question that we haven’t been able to formulate. For the artist, the artwork is a presence whose origin never distorts its aim, and whose aim extols every moment of its origin. It is his way to have a discussion and to generate bonds from small questions for a more and more extensive listing of answers.
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h & f (from The Course of Margins series) / 2016 ink on vellum 60 x 90 cm / 23.6 x 35.4 in 33
Emilio Chapela Mexico, 1978
Chapela’s artistic practice is concerned with the development of a system that allows the operator to control various processes such as those used for conventional and unconventional methods to determine the relative importance of individualized factors. He studies the effect of the increasing importance of the different methods used to identify the specific factors involved in the production and dissemination of a particular type of information. In such a way, he has worked with several different methods to determine how the various systems respond to the needs identified through their own resources. His work is concerned with the nature of media and its impact on society. It challenges our relationship with everyday tools and technology by forcing media, such as such as books, libraries, computers, Internet and social media, to reveal complex interactions inherent in society.
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White Noise / 2016 HDF 72 x 52 cm / 28.3 x 20.5 in 35
Jaime Gili Venezuela, 1972
Gili combines the sobriety of geometric abstraction with exciting, dynamic forms, marking the surface of his canvases with razorsharp shards of explosive color. His paintings hearken to Venezuelan modernist trends that occurred at a time when the country was undergoing an unprecedented oil-boom that bolstered its economy in miraculous ways. These artists often tended towards abstraction, likely following in the tradition begun in the 20th century, which established abstraction as the most sophisticated language to which the arts could aspire, often synonymous with progress and enlightenment. In this sense, Gili paints what has traditionally been regarded as a language of progress and reconfigures it for an era where those goals and ideals have ultimately failed to achieve what they promised. Repetition, pattern and mechanization in Gili’s work function as a meditation on the dilemma of artistic ‘style’ as a fundamental determinant of the value of an artwork, and the basic assumption that it may bring about positive social change. The decision to embrace a style as self-referential commentary is a fundamentally postmodern aspect of his work, and gives his paintings a sense of irony and detachment. Gili nonetheless embraces this style as part investigation, part homage, and part belief in the possibilities that remain within art as a social institution.
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E48 GALIKE / 2016 acrylic on canvas 40 x 30 cm / 15.7 x 11.8 in
E47 BLAKE / 2016 acrylic on linen 35 x 30 cm / 13.8 x 11.8 in 37
Justin Hibbs England, 1971
Across his practice, Justin Hibbs picks apart the mechanics of spatial perception and representation, drawing upon social, political and aesthetic agendas encoded within architectural structures. In particular, much of his work is a renegotiation of the visual language and ideological legacies of modernism, seeking to establish and question relationships between real and idealised notions of space. This is enacted through a uniquely multi-disciplinary approach that incorporates painting, drawing, sculpture and architectural interventions. More recently, the ideas initiated in his drawings are taken further in a series of site-specific installations and sculptures that engage directly with the specific conditions of the architectural space itself. Vinyl tape or linear wooden constructions are used as a drawing medium to translate ideas at life-scale directly onto walls, windows, and physically into the space. These immersive architectural interventions allow the viewer to navigate the space and work, providing a stage set for an individual relational and perceptual response. They indicate Hibbs’ ongoing interrogation of the relationships between different forms of representation, playing off the two-dimensional language of the diagram and the structural language of threedimensional construction processes.
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Dis-United States of Form (part II) / 2016 mural installation and mixed media on paper 395 x 650 cm / 13 x 21.3 ft 39
Untitled / 2016 acrylic on paper 42 x 29.5 cm / 16.5 x 11.6 in 40
Paradigm / 2016 acrylic and ink on paper 42 x 29.5 cm / 16.5 x 11.6 in
Paradigm III / 2016 acrylic and ink and photographic transparency on paper 42 x 29.5 cm / 16.5 x 11.6 in
Object relations III/ 2015 acrylic and ink on paper 29.5 x 21 cm / 11.6 x 8.3 in 41
Károly Keserü Hungary, 1962
In today’s fast-paced, digital world Keserü’s hand-made drawings and collages offer a direct link to his creative process. They involve a very laborious and almost obsessive process with meticulous attention to detail that reveals a strong meditative aspect which Keserü fuses with a genuine, almost innocent playfulness. The presence of the grid and the dot, recurrent in all his paintings, appear as a theme in Keserü’ works on paper, yet range much further: from methodical, geometric compositions to flowing line patterns, sometimes randomly executed. The line is often applied in ink, freehand or with a ruler, but also created by folding and collage techniques. There are dense rectangular shapes emerging from layered scribbling with a ballpoint pen. Maps, landscapes, technical or organic systems come to mind when looking at the variety of works. Keserü’s drawings are looser, more experimental and light-hearted than his paintings yet here as well all interpretation remains detached and subjective.
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Untitled works / 2007-2014 ink, graphite and piercing on paper 30 x 21 cm / 11.8 x 8.3 in each 43
Asger Dybvad Larsen Denmark, 1990
The subject of Asger Dybvad Larsen’s work is an ongoing investigation and challenging the dialogue of traditional understanding of painting. His conceptual paintings are identified most clearly in their dialectical conversation with the medium’s traditions and its classic structure. This is done with a substantial focus on the traditional paintings materials. He sands the painting so that the stretcher bar appears as part of the piece. This particular process focuses on the physicality of the painting and stores the process in the surface of the art work - one of the medium’s strengths. Asger Dybvad Larsen also works with surfaces in his paint-tray paintings. An acrylic paint-cast of the tray’s structural surface is mounted on a canvas and acts as an abstract motif in the work, and refers back to the precursors and the basic materials of a traditional painting. The same theme can also be seen in his stirring-stick frames, or when he shows simultaneously both the front and back of a canvas.
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A Pressure of a Paint Tray / 2015 acrylic on canvas 35 x 28 cm / 13.8 x 11 in
A Pressure of a Paint Tray / 2015 acrylic on canvas 30 x 20 cm / 11.8 x 7.8 in 45
José Carlos Martinat Peru, 1974
Martinat’s art is at the interface of real and virtual worlds; his sources of inspiration are architecture and the urban milieu, human and cyberspace memories. His multimedia installations and sculptural assemblages incorporate a diversity of materials and strategies to alter preconceptions in regards to where things belong, he brings imprints meant for the street to the gallery, as an archeologist of sorts. This offhand methodology manifests in a number of manners. Banner-like objects are made from transfers of political parties’ logos found in the city walls by means of lifting off the texture of the paint in resin. These Pintas are unmediated appropriations of political slogans fragments that end up pasted onto gallery walls. The fascination with architectural modernism is matched in Martinat’s case by a penchant for a certain kitsch aesthetic that he articulates with the inclusion of tagging, strident colour and street art strategies. His ‘Ejercicios Superficiales’ series encompasses a number of bodies of work in different mediums that generally evoke the idea of superficiality in the use of readymade surfaces covered in graffiti.
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Untitled (from the Ejercicios Superficiales series) / 2012 fiberglass, resin and lacquer 210 x 140 cm / 82.7 x 55.1 in 47
Mario Palacios Kaim Mexico, 1953
Building upon contemporary printmaking, Palacios Kaim has developed a new technique of oxidation with silver sheets printed on paper in order to achieve unity, both in the formal process and the conceptual outcome of his work. The procedure is a type of minimalism and conceptualism similar to Sol LeWitt’s, in which the work is conceived prior to the selection of the material, based on a concept. The work evolves from a design, a drawing or an intuition left exposed to a physical/chemical event, controlled by applying sealants to specific areas.
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16:9 Aspect Ratio (edition of 12 + 3 ap) / 2016 silver leaf on 300g Aquarelle paper 56 x 76 cm / 22 x 30 in 49
Martín Pelenur Uruguay, 1977
As methodical as the artist is, it is the randomness and excitement of unknown results that give Pelenur’s work special appeal. Working primarily in old abandoned floors of Montevideo’s old city, Pelenur can work large while experimenting on numerous processes simultaneously. In short, Pelenur’s works appear to be calculated surprise. Recent series by Pelenur involve the application of various forms of tape and unique papers into stunning 3 dimensional grids or patterns laid on a 2D surface, usually in structured squares or rectangular forms in blacks, whites, rich blues and the earthy warm southern palette. Pelenur’s work is influenced by the minimal painters whose work shaped the art world during the 1960s and 1970s, but he is more interested in the process of painting as an ongoing continuous experiment which needs to be explored by employing scientific methods.
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Untitled / 2015 masking and black tape on paper 76 x 56 cm / 30 x 22 in 51
G. T. Pellizzi Mexico, 1978
Pellizzi has long been interested in numbers and finance, and in the recent past has produced shows based on property values and the economic crisis. His Conduit series are composed of light fixtures, made of long crisscrossing steel poles, each of which has a colored lightbulb attached to its end. The artist selected colors that allude to those found at construction sites: The bulbs of the first fixture are scaffolding-blue, the next yellow to reference temporary flooring, and the third connote red painted steel pipes. These Mondrianesque structures recall diagrams of constellations tracked for the purposes of divination, as one now tracks the movement of a line through a financial graph.
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Conduits in Red, Yellow and Blue (Figure 47) / 2015 galvanized steel, ceramic sockets, copper wire and color lightbulbs 130 x 60 x 16 cm / 52.2 x 23.6 x 6.3 in 53
Ricardo Rendón Mexico, 1970
Gathering all kinds of materials and giving room to multiple formal solutions, media and work procedures, Ricardo Rendón’s work functions as a complex diary where the actions are recorded, documented and accumulated in the transformation and manipulation of the materials and the working place. The artist proposes an epic that assaults architectures and objects equally. Its working project establishes a direct dialogue with the capital gain originated by the difference between the wages paid to the worker and the value generated by its manpower within the capitalist system. It is a query on the work and its sense by means of the experience. A narrative that the artist establishes leaving in most cases the waste of its activities within the place of intervention: swept to a corner, gathered inside a transparent container or scattered around the working site. Thus, he proposes a gesture that alludes to its procedure, a commemoration of every moment destined to the production of the capital gain. In his works, Rendón proposes a renaissance in reverse that emphasizes manual work, and exposes the worker face of conceptual art, that which values the process and the singularity of each gesture. Rendon demonstrates the metaphysics of things in the things themselves, it is within the work, in that which can be seen and touched, and in its process of creation, that the thought generated by the work remains.
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Possible Nature / 2015 lathed cedar wood, graphite and iron structure variable measurements 55
Saúl Sánchez Colombia, 1970
Saul Sánchez’s work questions different ideas related to the conceptual values of painting and the process conditions, proper of the different ways of representing images. Through projects developed from a pictorialist´s practice and its expansive possibilities, he attempts to deepen his reflections on learning schemes, the crossing between the hegemonic and subordinate experiences, and universes inhabited by power and its meaning. Color interpretation, the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, and the relationship between the traditional forms and the contemporary practices of pictorial environment, are some of the main topics that structure his work. Through installation projects, paintings and drawings, Saul explores the relationships those art forms have with their context (commercial, institutional and educational).
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One After Another In Succession / 2015 acrylic and masking tape on paper 25.5 x 30.5 cm / 9.2 x 12 in each 57
Dannielle Tegeder United States of America, 1971
Dannielle Tegeder’s works depict constellations of imagined urban systems: roadways, electric lines, sewage pipes, and wireless networks that have been filtered through some Suprematist formal vocabulary. For the past fifteen years, Dannielle’s work has explored abstraction. While the core of her work is paintings and drawings, she has recently begun to include large-scale installation, sculptural objects, video, sound, and animation.
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Birch Chemical Silver Suspended City with Classification of Color and Shape Language / 2016 collage, acrylic, graphite, vellum and leather on wood 60.5 x 50.5 cm / 23.8 x 19.9 in
Cherry Constructivist Chemestry After Structure and Silver Code / 2016 collage, ink, color pencil, acrylic, graphite, vellum, leather and copper plate on wood 60.5 x 50.5 cm / 23.8 x 19.9 in
Mahogany Golden Secret Universe Plan with Structured City and Pink Exhaust System / 2016 collage, ink, color pencil, acrylic, graphite, vellum and leather on wood 60.5 x 50.5 cm / 23.8 x 19.9 in 59
Wolfram Ullrich Germany, 1961
Ullrich works with a formal vocabulary that is grounded in geometric abstract art, the origins of which can be traced in turn to classical Constructivism –a current that emerged in several different schools of art during the second decade of the 1900’s, among them Russian Suprematism (as embodied in the work of Kamisir Malevich, for example) and the Dutch ‘De Stijl’ movement (as exemplified by Piet Mondrian). What these two stylistic currents had in common was the goal of breaking away from realistic depiction of the visible world. Artists were no longer interested in rendering things as they saw them. They strove instead to create a new world of visual imagery using abstract, geometric forms – a pictorial world that was its own subject and its own meaning, expressed as pure colour, pure form. The works of Wolfram Ullrich bear eloquent witness to the vitality and complexity of Constructivist art in our own time. All of Wolfram Ullrich’s works share the clarity and rigour of Constructivist formal language, which avoids embellishment of any kind. Tight angles and clearly defined forms dominate his compositions. It is a style of art which – though often declared dead – has lost nothing of its freshness and vitality.
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CHEGA / 2010 acrylic on steel 80 x 66 x 5 cm / 31.5 x 26 x 2 in 61
THE GALLERY
ARRĂ“NIZ The gallery emerged from a particular interest to work with a new generation of artists from Mexico and Latin America. Our main drive is to support and closely follow the careers of our artists both locally and internationally. A key element to our labor are exchanges with other galleries from other countries and participating in art fairs around the world.
Our local program is composed by exhibitions by our represented artists, and a parallel presentation in the projects room where a specific piece or project –created with the space in mind– is showed. This allows us to expand our cultural offer to new audiences while working in collaboration with other artists, curators and institutions.
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CREDITS Abstraction 2, a group exhibition by Arróniz Arte Contemporáneo. July 9th - September 10th, 2016, Mexico City.
Gallery director and curator: Gustavo G. Arróniz Design and photography: Otmar Osante
© 2016, Arróniz Arte Contemporáneo. All rights reserved.
This publication may not be photocopied, printed nor reproduced in any medium or by any method, in whole or in part, without the written authorization of the gallery.
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