Miguel Marcos Gallery is pleased to invite you to the exhibition EVOLUTION that brings together a series of international artists, whose works will become the nucleus to illuminate some questions about contemporary art.
The combination of works by David Tremlett, Dennis Hollingsworth, Alan Charlton Álvaro Soler-Arpa, Fabian Marcaccio and Glen Rubsamen, means to reconstruct in the space of the gallery the line of artistic creation of the last decades, of which we understand the constant evolution in the field of painting and Art History in general. All of them are experimental artists that cover different techniques and disciplines to achieve works of all minimalist and figurative conditions, regardless of styles or possible narratives.
The expository narrative is structured on the basis of the idea of artistic intention, considering the works as visual manifestos capable of expressing different conceptions of what art can and should be and the role it plays in society.
The works that consist of this exhibition are grouped according to criteria of affinity of the authors from what to understand that the closeness in the use of artistic language doesn't necessarily translate into a common purpose with respect to the purpose of their art. Looks don't arise from the mimesis or the search for originality, but from the aspiration of the pictorial practice as an intellectual process and the construction of the subject.
The long and convulsive trajectory in the arts that goes from the appearance of cubism and abstract art towards the end of the first decade of 1900 until the most essentialist current, Minimal Art, is dotted with wars and revolutions and also with great ideological and social changes. In the exhibition you can see works of the followers of this perspective, both Alan Charlton, and David Tremlett bet on the minimal movement, starting from a very particular vision of pictorial creation, which involves the taste for architecture, geometry and mathematics.
The works of David Tremlett (St.Austell, Cornwall, England, 1945) are based on the idea of displacement in time and space and describe an imaginary and memorable world whose circuits are in resonance with a legendary err. Each of its realizations comes from what is called a projection. The paper appears as a new field of experimentation, a new journey. The artist is passionate about the pastel technique, defined as: "It is a fragile, delicate powder, so light that it can be blown, but at the same time something strong, demanding and structurally resistant can be done”.
The creative universe of Alan Charlton (Sheffield, England, 1948) configures studies based on gray color under a systematic method with which he calculates its size and structure. The technical construction of his paintings is always the same: part of 4.5 cm modules from which he determines their length and width, creating structures that evolve by their own internal logic. This measure is the artist's golden number. In the end, the will to find the most perfect and harmonious measure of an object has been a topic from Plato to Euclid, from Leonardo to Mondrian. On the other hand, the gray color, considered in the art world as a non-color, does not represent a starting or ending point as what would be the case of white or black, but a central point, motionless on the surface.
In the art of Dennis Hollingsworth (Los Angeles, USA, 1956) some of the basic questions of abstract art are posed as the absolute power of art, the emancipation of conventions and the spiritual revolution to express what remains hidden from the senses. In his paintings the multicolored whirlwind of his palette is observed, which becomes almost Fauvist combined with the psychoanalysis of creation, giving rise to a work full of symbolism and emotions, in which freedom and containment, free will, pure mathematics, original chaos and the most harmonious confusion of fantasy are intuited. Contextualized in its beginnings within the framework of the new American expressionists, its attitude towards art and painting are materialized in a rebellion against the industry of the beautiful, in an aporia induced by a romantic fascination with the unlimited and in a strange desire to dematerialize the painting in "pure visuality”.
Fabian Marcaccio (Rosario, Argentina, 1963) configures an artistic research around the survival of painting in the digital era. In his paintings, we see the interest in and concern for the growing evolution in the media fields, approaching images and contemporary issues related to society, economy and politics -from the banking crisis to terrorism- that interweave a hallucinated contemporary history and kaleidoscopic in the media saturation of our time, particularly in the United States. He uses digital and industrial techniques as part of his pictorial process, showing a constant concern for the representation of time and space from the perspective of transgender. It results environmental paintings in which he combines digitally manipulated images with their three-dimensional dimension and pictorial character.
The work of Glen Rubsamen (Los Angeles, USA, 1959) focuses on the documentation and collection of certain moments of nature charged with great power and drama and absolute sensual tranquility. The landscape of Rubsamen is concise, minimal, fragmentary, unlocatable, but possessed by a disturbing perspective where the most unsuspected issues could take place. His palm trees silhouetted in black on a splendid field of color are not just metaphors of a reality that allows all its infinite framings, but an atmosphere disconnected from any spatio-temporal reference in which the viewer enters, disoriented and attentive, to participate in a static action in which the organic becomes artificial.
Finally, the sculpture of Álvaro Soler-Arpa (Girona, Spain, 1974) takes us to the final point of the exhibition showing one of the main concerns of human evolution, exposing at the same time a possible scenario with apocalyptic tints which the artist places in the not too distant future if things do not change. A subjective and poetic vision of what the consumer society is causing on the planet. It includes a long list of disorders such as the excessive exploitation of resources and the widespread mistreatment of the same, the exponential increase in demographic density and the artificially developed longevity.