ARCOmadrid 2024

6 – 10 February

Booth 9C14

Ifema Pav. 9, Madrid

Carlos Bunga 

Ignasi Aballí

Joana Escoval

João Louro

João Pimenta Gomes

Susanne S. D. Themlitz

At ARCOmadrid 2024 GALERIA VERA CORTÊS presents a stand plan conceived as six solo projects, featuring works by Carlos Bunga, Ignasi Aballí, Joana Escoval, João Louro, João Pimenta Gomes and Susanne S. D. Themlitz. The booth layout is composed of different walled spaces resembling small exhibition rooms, where each artist creates a presentation of new and earlier works encouraging an in-depth experience of their practice and recent projects.

CARLOS BUNGA

Carlos Bunga (b. 1976 Porto) lives and works near Barcelona. He creates process-oriented works in various formats: sculptures, paintings, drawings, performances, video, and above all in situ installations, that refer to and intervene in their immediate architectural surroundings.

After winning the Spanish Critics Association Award for Best Artistic Project at ARCOmadrid last year, this year’s selection continues Bunga’s formal language and his highly developed degree of aesthetic care and delicacy. Presenting all new sculptures and paintings, the conceptual complexity derived from the inter-relationship between doing and undoing, between unmaking and remaking, between the micro and the macro, between investigation and conclusion find here full expression.

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While often using ordinary, unassuming materials such as packing cardboard and adhesive tape, Bunga’s work involves a highly developed degree of aesthetic care and delicacy, as well as a conceptual complexity derived from the inter-relationship between doing and undoing, between unmaking and remaking, between the micro and the macro, between investigation and conclusion.

Straddling the divide between sculpture and painting, Bunga’s deceptively delicate works are characterized by an intense study of the combination of color and materiality, while at the same time emphasizing the performative aspect of the creative act.

Solo exhibition

Carlos Bunga

Performing Nature

Curated by Sandra Guimarães

Museu Helga de Alvear

25 January – 12 May 2024

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IGNASI ABALLÍ 

Ignasi Aballí (b. 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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Eight paintings made with eight different types of canvas prepared to be painted on. Eight tones, textures and materials that are shown without intervening on them, the step prior to being painted. This work is related to an earlier one by the artist, titled Waste (2000), in which the paint was left to dry inside the pots without producing anything with it.

The work proposes reflection on action: what can be painted on these canvases that are waiting to be activated? The supports themselves here become the finished work and are displayed as a sample book open to all possibilities. Eight monochrome “paintings” that, in fact, contain no paint at all.

This work follows the same principle as the work carried out in 1997 entitled Correction (2001). If in that case the Tipp-Ex correction fluid was applied to a 100 x 100 cm mirror to cancel its ability to reflect what was around it, in this case it is applied to a canvas for paintings prepared in black. In fact, this work would be a mixture of the aforementioned Correction and Big Mistake (1998), which consisted of covering with Tipp-Ex a black square of 100 x 100 cm previously painted on the wall.

As in these previous works, the white background has been restored, considered the most neutral and correct to paint on. The original black background has been “corrected” to be able to start the process again on a neutral white. An action to correct and erase alleged errors carried out with a product specially manufactured for this purpose, which is normally used to correct texts in order to start over on the blank page.

It is a work that refers to the history of recent painting: to Malevich’s Black Square on a White Background and White on White or monochrome painting in general by authors such as, for example, Robert Ryman.

A collection of four hundred slides, make up this work. All of them are related to the history of art, from prehistory to contemporary art. The casual mixture of all of them proposes an art history that, from an academic point of view, could be considered inadmissible: the images are completely mixed and do not follow a chronological order, they are all poorly placed and the color and its definition have been altered due to a long exposure to sunlight.

It is a collage of works from chance encounters, which proposes a new reading of the art of the past, far removed from the orthodox classification that would be proposed from a classical point of view.

JOANA ESCOVAL

Joana Escoval (1982) lives and works in Lisbon. Her practice circumscribes both visual and aural in the form of sculpture, painting, sound, collective walks, video installations, and printed matter. Expanding on the environmental aspects of the body’s energy systems, her works are passages, open-ended invisible paths.

The rhythm and fluidity of the elements she uses in her work are temporarily suspended in time, and will eventually follow their natural transition and transmission into other states of matter, keeping their new-found charges and vibrations from when they were sculptures.

Whichever form they’re found in (often metals compounded or purified, mixed as alloys or mixed with other materials), these elements are charged with energies that unite beings and objects, the material and the spiritual. Escoval blurs the borders between what we are so used to calling “nature” and “culture,” and emphasises instead how everything is entangled and connected, seeing “nature” and its cycles beyond a western point-of-view—and most of all seeing it as something that is not separate from us.

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Our bodies are bathed in and surrounded by vibrations. The vibrations that we can see are called light.

Our bodies are bathed in and surrounded by vibrations. The vibrations that we can hear are what we call sound.

Our bodies are bathed in and surrounded by vibrations. The vibrations that we can see are called light.

Energetic space between the internal and the external processes. Physical and non physical nourishment helps adjusting to the dense physical world.

JOÃO LOURO

João Louro (b.1963) lives and works in Lisbon. He studied architecture at the University of Lisbon and painting at the Ar.Co School of Visual Art. His body of work encompasses painting, sculpture, photography and video and his conceptual and formal languages descend from minimal and conceptual art, with special attention to avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century.

Louro’s selection of works draws out a topography of time, with references that are personal but also 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.

Moreover, his sculpture work builds on popular references or imagery – such as a bicycle in this case – , subverting the expectations through a play with scale or function.

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JOÃO PIMENTA GOMES

João Pimenta Gomes (Lisbon, 1989) is a visual artist and musician who lives and works in Lisbon. Pimenta Gomes studied Music Production, Photography and Drawing and is an invited lecturer in Sound and Image at the Escola das Artes da Universidade Católica do Porto.

Últimos Sons (Last Sounds), curated by Germano Dushá is his first solo show at GALERIA VERA CORTÊS, and is on view until 26 March. In the exhibition, Pimenta Gomes continues his research about the possible interactions—both physical and subjective—between body, sound, and space. In the new sound installation, he combines concepts and sensory exercises, orchestrating analog and digital instruments to create environmental experiences and generate undefined, abstract, non-linear narratives.

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His practice draws on references from the musical field and explores the relationships between space and the body through the manipulation of modular synthesisers, images, videos and objects. His works create experiences which explore the proximity and tensions between the analogical and the digital, the sensorial and the conceptual. Through performances and live events the artist expands these experiences to the audience who, by coming in contact with the works, observes the process of creation of the musical idea and sonic composition, making their body – its approximation, removal or modelling – a central element in the creation of the works.

SUSANNE S. D. THEMLITZ

Susanne S. D. Themlitz (Lisbon, 1968) lives and works in Cologne and Lisbon. She studied Visual Arts Studies between 1987 and 1995 at Ar.Co. (Lisbon), the Royal College of Art (London) and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

In Susanne S. D. Themlitz’s work, drawing is a practice intimately connected to the development of idiosyncratic mechanisms between thought and imagination, therefore, it’s a medium that allows her to explore and feed processes of oddity. Each drawing assumes a cut with the exterior. The off-field doesn’t exist. Everything is inside, in this inner world, with its singular meteorology and with the unique capacity of gathering forces, energies and vibrations that distinguish it as a peculiar reality.

For the highlight project at ARCOmadrid 2024, Themlitz presents a series of new large scale paintings, drawings and sculpture which create a visual microcosmos where the emotional experience of dream and childhood narratives, flow freely between the real, the imagined and the symbolic.

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JOIN US FOR THE BOOK LAUNCH OF

“MOMENT MONUMENT” BY SUSANNE S. D. THEMLITZ

Thursday, 7 March I 4pm

– Painting. Also a fragment of a huge Rorschach half-stain in oil paint. And phrases.
– Drawing. With collages on paper. Words, captions. Perception. Identity.
– Sculpture. In glazed clay, still life.
– The book Momento Monumento. Your body on A4 pages, your pages, the days of a year. Many more times kept inside. Travel not travel. An introverted installation. Phrases. Drawings. Every moment a monument.

All underwater, subterranean, subcutaneous landscapes. Paint, words, lichen, swamp, ceramics, skin, ghost. Red. Blue. Water. Wind. One state. Or another. Disturbance. Parallel existence. Sediments of macroscopic, solidified traces.

Traces. Dripping paint. Frozen on the canvas, on the drawing, even on the glaze of the ceramic. Phrases, words suspended over one moment or another.

Maps, memories, dreams and somewhere the Anthropocene. No specific place, free from geography.

Just a second. The fragility of time. And perhaps silence.