Nothing is the Same (Likes 2022)

After two years of health, social and cultural problems, still shrouded in the mists generated by the world crisis on an artistic circuit that daily continues to renew itself, Puxagallery presents its annual project “Likes” with a group exhibition that emphasizes the renewal of the creative spirit, enthusiasm for living and faith in the uniqueness of things. The exhibition which includes recent works by nine gallery artists and guests, opens at the gallery on Thursday 17th of February 2022.

It is a new generational encounter that pursues reflection, intelligence and a lyric that inhabits the contrast of forms and concepts, borrowing the title from the poem “Nothing is the same” (1962), by the Asturian poet Ángel González in order to emphasize contemplative optimism and the small differences that define the passing of time. Avoiding mimesis and yearning for new voices to configure new stories with paintings, sculptures, photographs and site-specific installations that trace transversal readings between each author and the whole, subtle fragmentary interactions where space coexists with organic, geometric, landscape and narrative languages.

Among the invited artists are the Argentineans Luciana Rago (1982) and Florencia de Titta (1985) whose installations show the frequent alternation of fabrics and paintings. Rago, with a delicate installation from her series “Involuntary Paintings”, reunites organic fiber, pigments and scenery. The idea of ​​the appropriation of the space in her proposal is displayed through the treatment of paint and paper as tactile metaphors of clothing becoming an homage to mystical passages and seeking direct contact with the viewer. Florencia de Titta draws attention to some ancestral forms like the spiral, to address issues such as immigration or the history of domestic work. In both cases, there is a claim of the feminine and a feverish commitment to overcome the evils of our time, endeavors that are effectively shown by the original figurative universe of the Asturian Sandra Paula Fernández (1972), whose spectacular drawing and collage on dibond entitled “Because there is no planet B” serves in the gallery to denounce consumerism, mistreatment or patriarchal abuse through visual icons that take advantage of digital and pictorial resources in a delicious horror vacui that ironizes about the need to take care of our planet Earth. This ecological vision is also an essential part of the photographic series “Honest Landscaspes” by Canarian Marisa Culatto (1964), who is developing her career in London with everyday life as a paradigm to combine the visual and the semantic, recovering personal files that she prints, wrinkles and rephotographs in suggestive allegories about the transformation of reality.

In “Likes 2022” we also include recent works by several artists from the gallery, such as Santi Lara (1975), who has continued to evolve without haste or pause since his last solo exhibition at Puxagallery and his subsequent participation in various international fairs. The painter from La Mancha continues illustrating an uninhabited space and a kind of post-future full of utopian figures to interpret the continuous dystopias of today’s world. Timeless visions, tender and powerful, at the limits of fiction. By Valencian artist, Silvia Lerín (1975), who two years ago joined Puxagallery after a successful career in the United Kingdom and obtaining a scholarship at Casa Velázquez, we exhibit a piece from her series “Copper Landscaspes”, with paintings that seek the constant affiliation between emotions and energies; visual paths where the pigments merge with the skin of each texture, with a metallic appearance, and slight nuances that claim a contemplative stillness. Also the works of Ramón Isidoro (1964) transcend the surface and the support testing those austere impulses on the bark of painting, with silence as an obsession. His series in small format on paper continue to explore the semi-hidden melodies of matter, in tenuous layers that claim inner peace, the passion of light and the hidden desire of certain musical melodies. The organic lightness of Mar Solís (1967), who last September presented her second solo exhibition at Puxagallery during Apertura Madrid 2021, generates vibrations, dispersions and fractures on her steel and wooden sculptures that, like cataclysms, fluctuate connecting art and science. A weightless space where nothing is what it seems. As does the Japanese Tadanori Yamaguchi (1970), whose latest works continue to experiment with the earthly and the spiritual, assuming the hatsuru as a guide, a direct dialogue with matter, without industrial or virtual tools, searching for traces on the marble and the stone, carving lights, erosions, rotations and other immemorial mysteries. Pretexts to harmonize the superficial complexity and the inner serenity of the creative dream.