Gonzalo Puch
UNA JORNADA SIN NUBES
Diego del Pozo
Casting 1971
23 September 2011–15 January 2012
Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB
C/ Saldaña s/n
09003 Burgos, Spain
“Sea of Tranquillity”
Visiting the exhibition “Sea of Tranquillity” is like being in a dream. This installation conceived by visual artist Hans Op de Beeck (Turnhout, Belgium, 1969) evokes, at first the melancholic and misty atmosphere of a museum which has not yet been opened or which is being dismantled: silence and a mysterious mood overcome the viewer, who approaches a room recalling the half-light of old-fashioned museums and inviting the visitors an amazing tour of around watercolours, models, sculptures and showcases filled with smaller pieces.
The articulating work of the installation is a short, from which the exhibition takes its title, combining shot images of actors and others three dimensional digitally generated. The short takes the viewer into a night tour on board of an intriguing cruise, Op de Beeck, who witnessed, at the French harbour of saint Nazaire, the construction of the Queen Mary 2, the biggest ocean liner at the time, uses this vast ship as a sharp metaphor of western principles such as leisure and luxurious consumption.
Reflection, a recurrent theme in this Belgian artist, on our complicated and troublesome relation with time, space and other humans is materialised through different aesthetic solutions, going stretching from an economic and minimalist visual language to overcharged, exaggerated designs, always responding to the objective of articulating the contents with as accurately as possible. Op de Beeck presents inexistent but identifiable places, moments and characters that seem to have been taken from everyday life so as to capture the tragicomic and absurd qualities of our postmodern existence through topics such as the absence of distances, the disincorporation of the being and the abstraction of time, consequences of a globalised world as well as the changes in our environment brought by the media, automation and technology.
GONZALO PUCH
“Una jornada sin nubes”
He is one of the Spanish artists who has contributed the most to the full integration of photography in current art, Gonzalo Puch’s work (Seville, 1951) articulates his work on a singular presentation of mental processes that deepen in the artist’s relationship with his individual and social reality and, solely, with his natural environment.
“Nature is possible for us thanks to the range of relationships that can be established with it, this way nature and culture can not exist separately”. These words successfully convey the sense and meaning of “Una jornada sin nubes”, Puch’s proposal for the Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos, CAB for this last term of 2011. Drawings, photographs, installation, video… The artist’s objective is to present a work in which nature is the background where everything takes place, as in previous projects,
This artist, a natural from Seville, who devoted the beginning of his career to sculpture and abstract painting has consecrated the last two years to combining drawing and photography through a process in which he first takes pictures of his drawings and later mixes them digitally with photographs. These “photographed drawings”—varied elements that are juxtaposed in certain situations that he captures with his camera and finally combines and adapts—are part of the exhibition and are the central part of the current exhibition “Un día sin nubes”, formed by the cuttings of these drawings freed from the rectangular sheet in which they were created.
The video, corresponding to the artist’s photography period, was also created as a collage of sequences that is related to the drawings in a sort of endless sequence, at the end of which some pictures show the process of such a personal creative march. In “Una jornada sin nubes” there are also some objects strengthening the idea of art and life.
Diego del Pozo
“Casting 1971″
The exhibition “Casting 1971″ arrives at the Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos, CAB, after being selected to take part in the first edition of the project P4, Platform for Art Support in Castile and Leon, an initiative aiming at stimulating art creation within the parameters of current art in all its disciplines: painting, sculpture, etching, drawing, photography, video, graphic, installation, videoart, electronic art as well as any other current tendency. Another three art centers in the region participate together with the CAB in P4, Artium 2002 (DA2) in Salamanca, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC) in León and the Patio herreriano-Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Español in Valladolid who will be holding other artistic proposals appointed by the Selecting Committee of the platform.
Multidisciplinary artist (drawing, video, objects installation…) and cultural producer, Diego del Pozo Barriuso (Valladolid, 1974) is the author of a work trying to establish connections between the satisfaction of individual major desires and the identity building processes, conditioned by the different mechanisms of social control. In short, the artist deepens in humans’ need for affection and our fight to resolve our yearnings within the context of a working and mass producing system, or as Del Pozo explains, in “too big distance between what people are and what they would like to be”.
*Image above:
Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Le Moulin.
