Twelve artistic worlds strive beyond borders at Dabbah-Torrejón, as the gallery celebrates five years of resounding exhibitions while overcoming a period of trials and tribulations in Argentina. Twelve artists, some founders of the gallery and others recently invited to join the years to come. As we follow their visions and proposals, there arises the recognition of a border without frontiers and the embrace of risk, thereby affirming the path of personal choice.
The expression “world” refers to an attempt to encompass the impossible: the search for plenitude and that which can be rationally understood. It also refers to the relationship that each artist establishes with reality in order to construct it: honoring the laws of nature and of one’s own body; rationalizing a process of abstraction; taking a stance vis-à-vis the cultural, social, and political environment; or plunging into the realm of illusion, fiction, and imagination—all approaches that are not so clearly separable. Throughout this process, there is a constant reflection on art history and the creative act. There is also the growing awareness of the subtleties with which both history and the expectation of a time yet to come, play a part—like phantoms of memory and hope—in the definition of the self and its creations, a self striving to achieve totality.
In Mariana Lopez’s paintings, the fragment becomes her anti-hierarchical strategy. In her works, we find both a clash between its parts and an effacing of the meaning of each of the key areas of the composition. Lopez transcribes images drawn from past films and magazines to her painting and presents them out of context. She attacks aspects of the micro-worlds that she chooses to depict, and she makes them ambiguous but above all disturbing. She modulates each fragment following the possibilities of oil paint, and disfigures it to allow for the appearance of an instance of mystery or a drama. She then articulates the fragments together contrary to the logic of collage, where the additions of different elements give place to a new reality or meaning. Here, the division is further accentuated. Perhaps fragmentation itself, and the impossibility to access a clear narrative, talk of the denial of meaning instead of its possibility, and make impossible the emergence of a discourse or ideology.
We therefore witness, in this exhibition, very diverse decisions informing the creative act. History, the healthy taking of risks, and the necessary combination of intuition and rational analysis play their part, as each of the artists delineates the boundaries of his or her own world. Necessarily, these borders are permeable, as they are informed by knowledge of the past and expectations of the future. They are also further drawn by each of the artist’s own works, as each implies a new search, a new step, in the attempt to position oneself vis-à-vis the complex definition of contemporary art today.
- Victoria Noorthoorn, Guest Curator
Translated by the author.
Francis Bacon, “Interview 3, 1971-1973” [with David Sylvester] in: Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, Eds., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press,1996) p. 203-204.
I refer to Max Bill’s understanding of a mathematical stance as stated in “The Mathematical Approach in Contemporary Art,” in Werk 3 (1949), republished in Max Bill (Buffalo: Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, 1974), pp. 89-100.
Donald Judd, “Art and Architecture” (lecture delivered at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, New Haven, September 20, 1983) in: Judd: Complete Writings: 1975-1986 (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 1987), p. 31.
Richard Serra, “About Drawing: An Interview” [Richard Serra and Lizzie Borden] in: Richard Serra: Writings, Interviews (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 51.
Agnes Martin, “The Untroubled Mind” (based on notes for the conference in Cornell University in January 1972), Flash Art 41, June 1973, 6-8; republished in: Agnes Martin (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1973), pp. 17-24.
David Wojnarowicz, in: http://www.queer-arts.org/archive/9902/wojnarowicz/wojnarowicz_bio.html.