Frieze London 2024

Booth C19

The Regent’s Park

9 – 13 October

André Romão

Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain

Céline Condorelli

Charbel-joseph H. Boutros

Ignasi Aballí

João Louro

John Wood and Paul Harrison

GALERIA VERA CORTÊS participates in Frieze London 2024, bringing to the Main section a selection of Portuguese and international artists in a curated dialogue, offering a glimpse of the evolving practices of these artists and highlighting some of their recent projects and new series of works.

 

ANDRÉ ROMÃO

 

André Romão was born in Lisbon in 1984, where he lives. His work mostly assumes the form of sculpture and poetry exploring ideas of transformation, mutation and fluidity. Taking emotion and intuition as building blocks his dream-like figures and landscapes often occupy a blurry field between the literary and the natural realms.

 

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Following his recent show at the Serralves Museum, André Romão continues his exploration of sculptural forms that evoke themes of horizontality, fluidity, and melancholy, investigating the delicate interplay between animation and stillness, flow and stasis. Romão’s practice, rooted in an engagement with organic forms and material transformation, reflects on the transitory nature, where pieces oscillate between presence and absence.

 

 

“As counterpoints and commentaries on a relationship to nature at its most intimate, the sculptures displayed on wooden plinths present a wide variety of lifeforms set in specific environments and ecological niches. They combine elements of flora and fauna, human and the mechanical, as they simultaneously represent formsat once strange and familiar, that inhabit an ambiguous land where gender is indiscernible. By trying to contemplate them, we envisage a fairer and more egalitarian world, where equality between species is recognised.”

 

Inês Grosso, curator of the exhibition “Calor” at the Serralves Museum

 

 

 

 

 

 

Calor, André Romão

Solo exhibition

Serralves Museum

 

Curated by Inês Grosso

17.11 2023 – 02.6.2024

 

Check the Online Viewing Room 

ANGELA DETANICO / RAFAEL LAIN

 

Angela Detanico (1974) and Rafael Lain (1973) are Brazilian artists living and working in Paris. 

 

Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain question the use of graphic signs in society. They are particularly interested in the notion and notation of the time and the forms, which it can take and thus create new writing systems by substituting traditional letters of the alphabet with forms from daily life. These forms are then staged in the exhibition space giving this writing an unprecedented materiality. Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain continue to question the role of language and its symbolic and physical place in our society. The language therefore reveals its dual function, a tool of communication but also instrument of reading and questioning of different cultures. Oscillating between rudimentary and advanced technology, their pieces take on forms as diverse as text, image, animation, sound and installation. Whether they are alphabets, cartographies or calendars, they address the very foundations of these codes governing our daily lives, convinced of the crossing between sign and meaning. The visions they put forth are, for the most part, codified, fragmented or transient. Born respectively in 1974 and 1973 in Brazil, they live and work in Paris. 

 

 

Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain are one of the four nominated artists for the Prix Marcel Duchamp. The award follows a group exhibition of the nominated artists at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which opens on 1 October 2024.

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Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Brazilian duo based in Paris and one of this year’s nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp, will bring a selection of compositions from their “River of Stars” project, also on view at the Centre Pompidou in the exhibition that will celebrate the winner. “River of Stars” reimagines the celestial map of different constellations into a suspended sculptural installation. Each star is represented by a polished metal sculpture whose shape is determined by the letters in the star’s name. These individual sculptures float in space, mirroring the stars in the night sky, creating a sense of weightlessness and cosmic fluidity.

They started with the names of faraway stars, which were part of certain constellations. These names were converted into a font called Helvetica Concentrated, developed by the artists in collaboration with Jiri Skala in 2003. Each Helvetica letter is placed within a circle whose dimension varies depending on the amount of ink needed for its printing. This way, there is a correspondence between the Roman alphabet written in Helvetica and different circles that depend on the printed area of each letter. The circles can be combined, and when overlapped with different opacities, they define a group with the letters of each word. Thus, each group of overlapped circles corresponds to a word.

 

 

 

 

CÉLINE CONDORELLI

 

Céline Condorelli was born in Boulogne-Billancourt/Paris, France, and is a French-Italian and British artist, living and working in London (UK).

 

Céline Condorelli was the National Gallery’s 2023 Artist in Residence, London.

 

Condorelli has produced an extensive body of work that develops different possibilities for living and working together, exploring notions such as public space, the commons, institutions, property relations. Condorelli’s practice is committed to a continuous exploration of the less explicit elements that compose the structures through which individuals encounter the world — be they cultural, economic, material, social or political – the apparatuses of visibility that are often taken for granted, and which the artist describes as “support structures”.

 

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Céline Condorelli is participating in Frieze Sculpture with “After Work”, a video work created in partnership with British filmmaker Ben Rivers. The process of making a playground is the starting point for the reflection on the relationship between work and free time, highlighting the hidden labour that underpins the production of culture. For the Main Section, Condorelli brings the preparatory drawings for her installation at Regent’s Park, offering a glimpse into her creative process and its conceptual framework.

 

 

 

FRIEZE SCULPTURE 

 

GALERIA VERA CORTÊS is also delighted to be participating in this year’s edition of Frieze Sculpture, showing “After Work”, a video work by Céline Condorelli and Ben Rivers.

 

Check the ‘After Work’ video here 

 

The process of making a playground is the starting point for the reflection on the relationship between work and free-time, highlighting the hidden labour that underpins the production of culture. “After Work” follows the construction of the commissioned playground “Tools For Imagination” by Céline Condorelli in South London (2021-) and is a collaboration with artist and filmmaker Ben Rivers and poet Jay Bernard, who wrote and voiced the soundtrack. At Frieze Sculpture, the video will be made public through a QR code presented on customised poster stand, whose colours will echo those used in the series of public playground sculptures developed by Condorelli.

 

 

 

 

CHARBEL-JOSEPH H. BOUTROS

 

Charbel-joseph H. Boutros was born in Lebanon in 1981 and lives and works between Beirut and Paris.

 

In his work invisibility is charged with intimate, geographical and historical layers; finding poetic lines that extend beyond the realm of existing speculations and realities. Being born in the middle of the Lebanese war, his art is not engaged in an explicit political and historical reflection, but is more accurately haunted by the said political and historical reflection.

For H. Boutros, each exhibition is a new geography that reformulates reality.

 

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Lebanese artist Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, whose work was presented at the last Istanbul Biennale, brings a selection crossing the realms of the poetic and the speculative. His practice, characterized by subtle interventions and a lyrical approach to space and materiality, invites viewers to consider the transient and ephemeral in everyday experiences.

IGNASI ABALLÍ

 

Ignasi Aballí (Barcelona, 1958) graduated with a BA in Fine Art from the University of Barcelona, city where he lives and works. All of Ignasi Aballí’s work draws a challenge on the viewer’s perception. At the base of his work is the interest in showing that there are many things that we do not perceive with our eyes but that equally affect us. And that, just because we do not see them, does not mean that they are not there, but rather that these build on the semantic tension between what we see and what we do not: transparent or opaque images, which do not “show” anything, if anything they hide… The same happens with texts that only show fragments, partial explanations, abstractions.

 

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Ignasi Aballí will present paintings, digital photographs and works on paper, in a selection that testifies the diversity of media in the artist’s practice. Between these, will be his CMYK series dedicated to magnified press images of seas and oceans, where this element, turned into pixelized image and featuring a caption identifying the source, becomes an abstraction and pulls away from the tangible (often bleak) of the newsprint context.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ignasi Aballí. In Ictu Oculi

Solo exhibition

Curated by Geovana Ibarra

 

Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain
7 June – 10 November 2024

 

Online viewing room

 

 

JOÃO LOURO

 

João Louro was born in 1963, in Lisbon, where he lives and works. He studied architecture at the University of Lisbon and painting at the Ar.Co School of Visual Art. João Louro’s body of work encompasses painting, sculpture, photography and video.

 

João Louro’s work descends from minimal and conceptual art, with special attention to avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. It draws out a topography of time, with references that are personal but mainly they are generational. With regular recourse to language as a source, as well as the written word, he seeks a review of the image in contemporary culture, starting out from a set of representations and symbols from the collective visual universe. Minimalism, conceptualism, Pop culture, structuralism and post-structuralism, authors such as Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Georges Bataille and Blanchot as well as artists like Donald Judd and the ever-present Duchamp, form the  reference lexical universe  of the artist.

 

He was the Portuguese representative at the Venice Biennale of 2015, with the exhibition “I Will Be Your Mirror | Poems and Problems”.

 

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For Frieze, João Louro will present a series of newly produced paintings and drawings. Among those will be a large new painting from his well-known Blind series, which he started in the 1990’s and continue to explore the excess of images and their relation to the textual.  By erasing (painting over, blinding, scratching the surface) the image and leaving only a narrative subtitle, Louro asks the viewer to enter a relationship of trust between what is textually present and what is visually absent.

JOHN WOOD AND PAUL HARRISON

 

John Wood (b.1969, Hong Kong) and Paul Harrison (b.1966, Wolverhampton) make things that move and things that don’t, things that are flat and things that are not, things that are mildly amusing and things that are definitely not. They make works that form a kind of reference manual for how to do, make, build, or draw things that you probably never want to do, make, build, or draw. They do it for you. Even though you don’t need them to. This attempt to compile an encyclopaedia of the everyday, started in 1993 after they met at art college.

 

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John Wood and Paul Harrison, duo of British artists, bring recent paintings and the large installation “6 orange chairs”.  Known for their playful engagement with language and expectations, these works continue to subvert the conventions of visual art to provoke thought and introspection.