Gallery Façade. November 2023.
Exhibition view.
Exhibition view.
Exhibition view.
Untitled, 2023. António Neves Nobre.
Untitled, 2023. Elvira Amor.
Untitled, 2023 (L); Sin título, 2023. (R). Elvira Amor.
Untitled, 2023. António Neves Nobre.
Exhibition view.
ST23010, 2023 (L); ST23011, 2023 (R). Amaya Suberviola.
Exhibition view.
Exhibition view.
Exhibition view.
Exhibition view.
Exhibition view.
Sin título, 2023 (L); Sin título, 2023 (CENTRE); Sin título, 2023 (R). Manuel M. Romero.
Magic Hour, 2023. Miguel Marina.
Magic Hour, 2023 (L); Somos cinco, 2023 (R). Miguel Marina.
Huella, 2020 (1); Apertura II, 2021 (2); Apertura I, 2021 (3); Cortina, 2020 (4). Mercedes Mangrané.
ST23012, 2023. Amaya Suberviola.
Metaphor II, 2023 (L); Metaphor I, 2023 (R). Alsino Skowronnek.
Exhibition view.
Information
THE AESTHETICS OF SILENCE
Elvira Amor, Mercedes Mangrané, Miguel Marina, Antonio Neves Nobre, Manuel M. Romero, Alsino Skowronnek, Amaya Suberviola.
Curated by Ester Almeda and Álvaro Conde.
From November 18th, 2023, until January 27th, 2024
“Can we really see and listen, when we are so busy being seen and listened to?1
The active participation of the public in front of the work of art has always been one of the most difficult educational goals, as well as questioned: in a world in which time is pressing, everything happens at great speed, and there are no moments of calm, getting the public to stop and observe a work, to draw their conclusions, to understand and analyze the artist’s process, is almost a heroic act. In the end, it is a face-to-face with the artist that few decide to confront. In parallel, we must question our mere role as spectators: are we completing the work of art or just being passive subjects of what became in the studio? We approach the aesthetic and creative principles from which the artist starts, but what are we if not simply witnesses of the here and now of an idea that dealt with yesterday and will witness the future?
The noise involved in the public exhibition of an artist’s work contrasts with the silence of the work process. Susan Sontag, in 1967, wrote the essay “The Aesthetics of Silence,” in which she states that silence is an essential part of the creative process that opens a space for contemplation. “Silence is the artist’s ultimate gesture of otherness: through silence, he frees himself from slavish slavery to the world, which appears as patron, client, audience, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work.”2 In the face of such noise, we start from the search for an initiatory space that borders on the sacred as far as primordial and essential is concerned, as a starting point on which the constant artistic action develops without any unwanted baggage.
Silence, in this case, is a space for reflection in which the artist can express himself freely, through the time in the studio, and which is radically opposed to the time of perception of the public. The execution of the work is almost a performative act, a bodily expression that plays a fundamental role in the process. In turn, and despite the inevitable physicality of the pictorial process, the creative act is articulated as a material result of an immaterial or invisible process. The coexistence with the work is vital for the result: the work of art does not cease to reflect the artist’s body, his desires, his interests, his struggles, and his illusions. We also understand silence as an option to the over-explanation of an artist’s work, which is sometimes opposed to its observation. “Today we expect artists to play a public role, to have access to interviews and magazine profiles in which they explain and justify their work.”3 If we focus, as in the case of this exhibition, on abstract painting, this need is often multiplied. The stripping of the relevant signifiers for the decoding of a traditional image generates a challenge to face in an honest and intuitive way. Silence, then, is transformed into noise, movement, and debate.
The notions of pause, silence, and calm fall short when talking about the work of Manuel M. Romero. In his works, the studio, understood as a place and as a stage, is the protagonist in the result of his paintings. It is almost a performative act extended in time, in which all the elements that make up his works have lived together with the artist, in his studio, and among them, they form a whole that results in a kind of collage of experiences, of decision-making, of rest and observation. Any element present in the studio -paint, paper, spray paint, stains, the weight of his own body when he steps on it- is a worthy candidate to become part of his work. Manuel’s works have a lot of skin, of body, of the human aspect of the process. An autobiographical and macrocosmic production in which painting is atomized to be diluted on the canvas as a remnant of a creative process that transcends aesthetics to enter the experiential aspect of the process.
Miguel Marina has focused his painting on the study of light and shadow, alluding to the idea of landscape, which we always find in his works, not in a figurative way, even if it starts from reality, a memory, or a longing. An uncertain and unlocatable landscape, which presents us with an alien reality that we take as our own. Magic hour transports us to an incipient night still illuminated, that moment of the day between dusk and nightfall that is neither one nor the other. Miguel Marina frames that non-night with flashes of white light, which reminds us of Joan Hernandez Pijuan when he spoke of his painting as “A space as a living element of the painting and not as a background on which one draws or places.”4 Through painting, he converts the space that is the canvas into something that one cannot stop looking at because one always seems to find something new, a new layer or glaze, which completes an image that you have never seen before and at the same time is familiar to you. Somos cinco (We are Five), is a small painting full of light, which (again, as the title of the painting points out) presents five elements, undefined, of a rust color that seem to emerge from the background of the canvas. Miguel Marina’s work is a dense painting, with many layers of information, which on most occasions reveal only a part of what they hide.
Fine lines at the bottom of his works limit the atmosphere that Antonio Neves Nobre generates, as if it were a parcel of unknown reality that circumscribes the image beyond the limits of the canvas itself, in an exercise of constant concealment and revelation. In this way, Neves Nobre introduces us to the concept of mystery. He generates deep colors, the result of which is a dense atmosphere full of nuances. His works are full of movement, of layers of color that play with glazes, with the tints of the brushstrokes, through different incisions and lines that make up his unique universe. He starts with something figurative that is familiar and at the same time strange; there is realism in his gaze, but he transforms it into something ambiguous that takes shape in paintings as “results of processes in which the technical means remain undefined. This technical lack of definition is one of the axes on which his artistic practice is based.”5 Silence, very present in the work of Antonio Neves Nobre, appropriates the method and the result, leaving the viewer with an indecipherable enigma.
As if it were a zoom of something that is assumed to be infinite, since we do not see a beginning or an end, we find the work of Elvira Amor, which starts from the purest abstraction, based on the principles of form and color. Sinuous forms escape from the limits of the canvas and paper and seem to encompass a much broader form than the one presented to us. Her most recent works are part of her work developed during her stay at the Spanish Academy in Rome, in which she decided to learn in depth the mural painting of Ancient Rome. In the dichotomy of being in a city still to be explored, and the need for time to work in the studio, she combined both desires through the study of Antiquity, of the ruins, of the visible silence that only the past can provide. The murals, conformed by an evident three-dimensionality, serve as a starting point and strategy, as inspiration, to later conform a painting that we assume to be flat, but which is plagued by layers and glazes.
In relation to the ruin but understood as a wound and trace of the passage of time, we discover the work of Mercedes Mangrané. In Apertura I, Apertura II, Cortina, and Huella, the four small format works present in this exhibition, Mercedes Mangrané starts from elements of the material world, tangible, that refer to the everyday, to her closest reality, and transforms them through a very material painting, which takes possession of the canvas and seems to overflow the limits of it. “My relationship with painting is overall intuitive. There is an important relationship with chance and control, it is not a painting of precision but one in which I try to let things happen.”6 Mangrané, layer upon layer, covers the surface, hiding the previous one, incising with the spatula after the paint is still wet, allowing a glimpse of what is underneath, but in a discreet, intimate way as if it were a wall cracked by the passage of time that allows you to see the changes and transformations suffered.
This idea of chance and control is also present in the work of Alsino Skowronnek. Programmer and artist, whose work has its roots in Street Art, works with machine learning tools to decode the symbolic languages of graffiti and work with them in his paintings. When the Surrealists, led by André Breton, began to use the method of automatic writing to somehow “decode” thought through the unconscious, they were harshly criticized, as they tried to decouple the conscious state from the creative act. Alsino decodes, through automatic learning tools, letter by letter, the calligraphy used in graffiti, so that it can “learn” and then use them in the reverse process, as he has done, not only in his paintings but also on this occasion for the façade of the MPA Gallery. He establishes a parallelism between open communication with the title of the exhibition and its transcription through machine learning tools, which translate the title into encrypted graffiti signs, provoking a kind of “uncanny valley” through the calligraphy.
Like Skowronnek, Amaya Suberviola makes her paintings through data, although in this case, it is constructed from a superposition of images from her archive, forming a hierarchy of these within the limits of the canvas. She starts from the figurative, from his reality, and generates a digital sketch that he later transfers to the canvas. The result is not only what we can see on the surface of the canvas, but also what is not seen: what is hidden under each layer, the images that we cannot see completely but without them the result could not be built, the success as an accumulation of errors. Suberviola translates these images, which start from something threedimensional to a flat image, and in this, she fixes her interest: the symbiosis between reality, the digital, and the plastic language. In a world dominated by screens and the accumulation of images, which pass at great speed before our eyes, Amaya Suberviola, working from that generational context, makes us stop in the small, in the anecdotic, in a fleeting image that appears unconnected through that set of realities, but that is familiar to us.
In the exhibition “The Aesthetics of Silence”, we propose the work of 7 international artists, who work in the field of abstract painting from the silence, simplicity, and pause; interested in the body itself reflected in the painting, in its coexistence with it; in the thickness of the pictorial matter; and in the transformation of the digital to the canvas, in a countercurrent path against the world around us.
Ester Almeda y Álvaro Conde