Catalogue 'The order of the days' by Galería Victor Lope Arte Contemporáneo

CONCHA MARTÍNEZ BARRETO The order of the days 29/11/18 - 26/01/19

CONCHA MARTÍNEZ BARRETO The order of the days 29/11/18 - 26/01/19 ‘The order of the days’ is an exhibition of the most recent work by the Spanish artist Concha Martínez Barreto (Murcia, 1978). A multidisciplinary show where, by different mediums and techniques, the artist will take us through the memory, that fragile but intense place where we collect our life and everybody else’s. Memory allows us to collect but also to recover moments, which without being completely loyal to what really happened, they shape and define us as time goes by. The artist reflects on the fragility of recalling, how hard it is to preserve a memory and consequently how easy it is to distort it. Artworks such as the series S/T illustrate with technical mastery this idea by means of borrowed memories. Another of the recurrent topics in Martínez Barreto’s work is that all powerful time. Time decays everything, it destroys everything, but at the same time it creates it all. Human

from those who could remember us, the ones that surround us. The artist studies the pass through life and how oblivion marks the end in that unsuccessful attempt to persist. Each artwork hides a story that it transcends by its character and technical quality. The artist tells us how each piece arises, what concept is hidden behind each chosen format in order to let the spectator judge and understand the medium that materializes each creation, from traditional means such as canvas or paper, to the use of technology in works like Birds, a neon light that turns on or off according to the proximity of the viewer, or Shipwreck, the deteriorated mock-ups of some ships that the artist puts back to sail inside methacrylate vases. The woks that will be shown in the exhibition reflect on the enigmatic value of time, how the dividing lines between what was, is and will be fade despite our effort to try to order

beings frequently have the necessity to them, that is what ‘The order of the days’ talks leave their trail in their pass through life, a about. necessity mainly frustrated by the oblivion

Series STRATUMS The work of archeologists consists in going deep in the sites and reading the different stratums, the deposits that time has gathered upon things. Through excavation they intend to understand the past and talk with it in order to be able, somehow, to rebuild it. In this series I operate based on this research model of time, leaving at sight the layers and instants of the past, but in my case, it is not about looking back but to make the past be present. The photograph becomes like this a deep space, as a low land in which would be buried everything that we are, simply waiting for the stratums to be removed one after the other. In these pieces the original photograph that is shown inside an empty space or window of the image is not only a trace from something previous but something that allows us to see the present time differently. Just like memory is build up from the present and it is not an immutable deposit but a constant flow in which we remember and at the same time we forget, what we see in these pieces, more than a mere dialogue among different times, is the questioning of the categories of past and present. In a similar way as it occurs in my paintings in which the space of the canvas is a meeting point where characters that were originally on different images and epochs converge, in these artworks I foster something similar, an encounter that causes a new meaning in which the appearance is not always as it looks, in which the present cannot be understood without the past.

Series STRATUMS

Stratums. The album 2018 Photography on HahnemĂźle Baryta 350g containing original vintage photography Unique 93 x 110 cm

Series STRATUMS

Stratums. Stuffed bird 2018 Photography on HahnemĂźle Baryta 350g containing original vintage photography Unique 146 x 170 cm

Series STRATUMS

Stratums. Laughing woman 2018 Photography on HahnemĂźle Baryta 350g containing original vintage photography Unique 93 x 110 cm

GRAVE GOODS From two anonymous and strange photographs from the 30s – doubtlessly taken by the personal implication that the authors must have had with those flowers – the artist built a diptych about life and evanescence, about the acceptance of death and the slightly trace that it leaves behind. In the occidental culture, the bouquets are full of ambiguity, cheerful connotations and also elegiac: they celebrate life when it arrives, and they are used at the same time to mark its end. The photograph is a symbol of shortness, life’s fragility, and memories.

Grave goods (Flowers for a beginning and for an end) 2017 Photography Diptych Edition of 5 95 x 260 cm

BIRDS ‘Birds’ is a neon connected to an ultrasound presence detector device, it is a piece that talks about the inapprehensible, about the difficulty to define memories, about the fugacity of life and its fragility. As if it were a real bird, to whom when we got close it would take off, the word ‘Birds’ turns off when we get close to it. The bird as a symbol of the human soul, of the spirit, is present in many cultures’ traditions and epochs and in this piece ‘Birds’ makes also reference to the intangible, what is more precious – love, memory, time, life – and to its elusive and fragile character. As in life bonds and memory, also ‘Birds’ is presented illuminated with its light. Though this artwork does not only put evidence in that light, but also to the possibility to fade, it talks about the difficulty to hold what it is inapprehensible and the fear to run out of what is finite. Face-to-face, the neon turns off. It is only on record what once had light, and, at the same time, it points out the hope that it can still turn back on.

View of birds turned off

Birds 2018 Neon and detector device of ultrasound movements Edition of 5 23 x 120 cm

Series THE JOURNEY ‘The Journey’ is a series of drawings in which childhood is shown as a starting point but at the same time as the center around which we always move. The desire to set off joins in these pieces to the fear of sinking in some spaces of crossed glances in which the scale of differences or what we cannot reach to decipher talk about the flexibility of time and the different speed at which we seem to see the world at that time in which life is yet to build. Children that played lonely in old photographs find themselves here in these drawings, surrounded by glances, by figures that seem to attend impassible to that presence – apparently out of time – of childhood. The slowness of the own process of drawing works as a search, as an attempt to get into those unhurriedly days of childhood. These pieces show the coexistence of different layers in the present instant, they reflect about time as a complex construction made principally with the past, with what we thought was forgotten, with childhood.

Series THE JOURNEY