fuera(de)forma
Fuera(de)forma is a group exhibition showing the projects developed by artists Victor Gonçalves (Brazil), Josephine Lau Jessen (Denmark), Patricio Tejedo (Mexico) and Lena Wurz (Germany) in the framework of Nectar Artist-in-Residence Program.
In collaboration with Espronceda Institute of Art & Culture and within the context of the emerging art festival Art Nou Primera Visió, NectART residency program is based on a call for project proposals which allows resident artists to deepen their artistic and creative process in a rural environment and connect their practice with the Barcelona art scene.
Fuera(de)forma [Out(of)space] invites us to explore, play, question and reconsider the path, the materials and the values of the new era. The projects by the four artists are based on their cultural and creative identities and personal motivations, which interconnect with each other and draw inspiration from Nectar's environment. In Fuera(de)forma, the artists tell stories and evoke questions about ecology and sustainability, about the value system and human consciousness and about the value of the soil/earth in our current and future time.
Josephine Jessen highlights the importance of Nature and our relationship with natural cycles and ironizes about the moral boundaries between observation and human intervention in nature through her video work, analogue photographs and installation, in which she invites us to engage and explore new ways of seeing.
Lena Wurz investigates the relationship between walking and thinking by mapping her thoughts and transporting them into different papers and supports, while inviting the public to actively participate in a non-linear game through a playful, instructive and reflexive language.
Patricio Tejedo works with materials that nature provides us to revalue and give them a new use, materializing the process of turning dust (nothingness) into objects (something) or space, as shown in his pictorial-architectural installation.
Victor Gonçalves presents a body of works composed by three installations through which the artist explores and arises questions about materiality, the values of space within our current time and society and about the future that is to come, creating his own aesthetic language.
In his series of drawing-installation "In the end everything is a carbon chain", the artist presents a series of tree roots and branches covered in graphite on the white expanse of the wall. The link between these roots that the artist found while walking in the surroundings of Nectar and the graphite symbol is disconcerting: things are not exactly what they look. Here, the artist questions the materiality of things and their relationships, covering the wood with graphite, giving them a different materiality and therefore transforming its meaning. In addition, as the artist says, the paper and the graphite exchange roles inverting the canons of drawing. As well as he does with the papers, giving them other shapes and space by curving them and creating movement between the wall and the branches. Victor Gonçalves alludes to the aesthetic potential of these objects he graphically displays and the compositional and artistic possibilities that are generated.
In “A piece of planet”, a sign reading “Area Privada de Caça” - which was found by the artist in the forests around Nectar - is delimited by a one square meter rubber and it speaks of the value of the land and its ownership, questioning the public/private property in a time where its value is unbalanced and taking as a reference the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s statement “Property is theft”.
The installation “Hay más futuro que pasado” is an artist’s statement on an eight-meter long rice paper in which the phrase is repeated and gradually fades away. Here, Victor Gonçalves questions our perception of time and our perspective of a better future despite the uncertain and dystopian future that lies ahead us, is there still hope?
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Olga Sureda
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Por Um Fio
Há pelo menos 10 anos o desenho tem sido um instrumento de investigação e de intervenção no mundo para Victor Gonçalves. Licenciado em Geografia pela Universidade Estadual Paulista (São Paulo, 2012), ele elegeu o desenho de observação em detrimento da fotografia como parte da metodologia para uma pesquisa sobre a apropriação do espaço público de Presidente Prudente, cidade no interior de São Paulo. Havia uma preocupação em questionar a absorção de certa realidade observada e utilizá-la como recurso interpretativo. O estudo venceu o prêmio Jovem Cientista (CNPQ/FAPESP) e apontou o caminho da arte para o então geógrafo, que desembarcou em Lisboa para aperfeiçoar sua formação artística no Ar.Co, em 2017.
O que vocês, visitantes desta primeira exposição individual de Victor Gonçalves, encontrarão aqui, no Espaço NowHere, é um corpo amadurecido de obras de um jovem artista que continua a desafiar a relação entre desenho e espaço, mas agora não mais sob a chave da representação espacial, e sim na tentativa de revolver a nossa percepção sobre o entorno, o ambiente, a arquitetura e outros tópicos. Estamos diante de uma miríade de possibilidades do desenho no campo ampliado , em que não apenas as noções tradicionais deste suporte são desafiadas, mas também a gravidade e o equilíbrio. Por vezes o desenho é resultado de um traço que salta da parede por conta de um êmbolo de vidro quase imperceptível ou pela ação da trajetória do sol amplificada por uma lupa posicionada na janela principal do espaço que traça um forte risco na madeira. Em outras, o desenho é artifício que camufla o papel como folha de metal pela aplicação vigorosa de grafite ou revela novos traços do casario e ruas que circundam a galeria através de uma lente de aumento que flutua. Em quase todos esses casos as coisas parecem à primeira vista, mas não são, o que nos obriga a entregarmo-nos à experiência de voltar a reconsiderar a realidade.
Os dispositivos criados por Victor Gonçalves estão por um triz, seja pela estabilidade precária dos materiais e elementos ou mesmo pela falência do vocabulário que já não dá conta para conceituarmos o que vemos. O desenho para este artista é risco no sentido de riscado e de arriscado. Há beleza, vulnerabilidade, engenho e astúcia nestas operações, tais como a vida que também está sempre por um fio.
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Cristiana Tejo
By a thread
{ing} For at least 10 years, drawing has been an instrument of research and intervention in the world for Victor Gonçalves. With a degree in Geography from Universidade Estadual Paulista (São Paulo, 2012), he chose observation drawing over photography as part of the methodology for a research on the appropriation of public space in Presidente Prudente, a city in the countryside of São Paulo. His concern was to question the absorption of a certain observed reality and use it as an interpretive resource. The study won the Young Scientist Award (CNPQ/FAPESP) and pointed the way to art for the then geographer, who arrived in Lisbon to improve his artistic training at Ar.Co, in 2017.
What you, visitors to this first individual exhibition by Victor Gonçalves, will find here, at Espaço NowHere, is a mature body of works by a young artist who continues to challenge the relationship between drawing and space, but now no longer under the key of representing the space, but to revolve our perception of the environment, surroundings, architecture, and other topics. We are faced with a myriad of drawing possibilities in the expanded field, in which not only the traditional notions of this medium are challenged, but also gravity and balance. Sometimes the drawing is the result of a line that jumps off the wall due to an almost imperceptible glass plunger or by the action of the sun's trajectory, amplified by a magnifying glass positioned in the main window of the space, which traces a strong line in the wood. In others, drawing is an artifice that camouflages the paper as sheet metal by the vigorous application of graffiti or reveals new traces of the houses and streets that surround the gallery through a floating lens. In almost all these cases, things seem at first sight, but they are not, which forces us to give in to the experience of reconsidering reality.
The devices created by Victor Gonçalves are on the edge, whether because of the precarious stability of materials and elements or even the bankruptcy of vocabulary that is no longer able to conceptualize what we see. Drawing for this artist is risk in the sense of scratched and risky. There is beauty, vulnerability, ingenuity, and cunning in these operations, such as the life that is also always hanging by a thread.
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Cristiana Tejo