From the Tangible to the Ethereal  (May 25th - July 31th)

The confinement and global health emergency of this Spring 2020 have not prevented our artists from maintaining enthusiasm, strength and creativity while exploring new paths for hope of a possible future far from immutable dogmas. For this reason, the first exhibition that we open after the state of alarm proposes a collective project capable of relativizing the essence of things travelling from the tangible to the ethereal, aware that life is as fragile as powerful is human mind.

The Puxagallery project turns four years old these days and to celebrate it we will host a new intergenerational encounter for our “Spring Show”, which in this fourth edition walks hand in hand with 4 represented and 4 guests artists whose works advocate contemplative silence, reflection, intelligence and essentiality. These are pictorial and sculptural compositions as well as site-specific installations that dialogue with each other, generating cross-sectional readings between each author and the ensemble, through subtle and poetic interactions characterized by fragmenting the space into organic, lyrical and geometric registers.

The first exhibition room welcomes us with a piece just finished by Irma Álvarez-Laviada (1978) that fully translates her creative interests, positioning herself between what is necessary and what is possible in order to contradict traditional expressive lexicons while conjugating a new formal language. The encounter between what is intended and what is sought remains unchanged in the solid career of this Asturian artist. Her floor piece alludes to the intrinsic qualities of art and tells the relationships between creative time and exhibition time through the use of material. In the background, the wall shows an installation with pieces in different formats by Paula Valdeón (1992), as an evolution from the set of works which she presented at the Niemeyer Center of Arts in Avilés thanks to the AlNorte Grant that the artist received last October. The young artist from Extremadura makes her debut at Puxagallery with these delicate works connecting touch, home and landscape, all key elements to harmonize textiles and drawings in order to offer containers of memory for the domestic space. The veteran painter Santiago Serrano (1942) completes this exhibition room with a new tribute to the musicality of silence, a constant quality in the consolidated career of this historical Castilian artist whose experimental capacity has never ceased and so has his faith in the intrinsic qualities of geometric purity. We are pleased to also include the debut in the gallery of artist from Córdoba – Rafael Jiménez Reyes (1989), whose work understands the artistic practice with transits between identity, distortion and alteration of the image. The pieces that he presents were made during the confinement and are inspired in episodes moving from the realistic narratives to the first abstractions, combining colored clay and paper that generate new expressive codes.

In the second exhibition room we find the works of the Valencian artist Silvia Lerín (1975), who participates for the first time with Puxagallery after a successful career in the United Kingdom during the past recent years. Her installations alternate two and three dimensional works, seeking the filiation between emotions and energies, proposing visual paths where the pigments interact with the skin of each piece, suggesting metallic-looking textures whose slight nuances demand contemplative stillness in order to transcend the surface of things. The works of Ramón Isidoro (1964) also analyze austere drives on the skin of painting that turns contemplative silence into his vital obsession. These recent series in small format on paper continue to explore the semi-hidden melodies of the subject under faint layers of paint that demand inner stillness, that passion of light of the hidden desire between symphonies and melancholic sets.

In this exhibition room, the organic lightness of Mar Solís (1967) throws a beautiful wink to the spirit of formal attraction / dispersion that always inhabits her suggestive drawings on amate paper in which she experiments with line and its fluctuations through polymorphic movements where each stroke slides both spontaneously and thoughtfully; a magical gesture in the intimate thoughts of this madrilian artist. Such is the case of the Japanese artist Tadanori Yamaguchi (1970), whose first solo exhibition at Puxagallery will open our 2020-2021 program next September. Here is a preview of one of his last pieces in wood in which Yamaguchi explores, as he does in his marble pieces, the organic forms of matter, remarking the hatsuru technique as his philosopher’s stone in which the process of dialogue with matter slides between the earthly and the spiritual.