Jessica Mein: Tramas (Frames)
Eugenio Espinoza
March 28–April 25, 2015
Opening: March 28, noon
Galeria Leme
Av. Valdemar Ferreira, 130
São Paulo
Brazil
Hours: Monday–Friday 10–19hr,
Saturday 10–17hr
T +55 11 3093.8184
info [at] galerialeme.com
Galeria Leme is pleased to announce the opening of two exhibitions from artists Jessica Mein and Eugenio Espinoza.
Tramas is Jessica Mein’s second solo show at Galeria Leme. The artist presents a new body of work, deepening her research on the physicality and spatiality of images, further subverting the boundaries and hierarchies between image and the physical support that sustains it.
Mein’s work focuses on the increasingly obsolete visual materials from Dubai and São Paulo, which are being substituted by high-tech alternatives. Her fascination with the nearly extinct billboard structures and papers in São Paulo, as well as the hand-printed hemp bags found in dry-goods markets around Dubai, is rooted in an investigation of the systems of production and dissemination of images throughout the urban space, and our consequent mental and physical relation to these processes and products.
Mein combines billboard fragments, originally discarded due to printing errors, with the manual imprints from the hemp bags that are generally used to transport rice. The artist uses the hemp as a source of imagery, surface and support for her works. A new image is then superimposed to the one that previously existed on the hemp bag. She also scans sections of hemp bags and transfers them as images onto blank hemp. And then unthreads, rips and cuts the material, in a manual process that is inevitably doomed to errors and imperfections. By doing this, the artist simultaneously reveals the constitution of the fabric, decomposing it to its threads and fibers, and also exposes the structure sustaining the work, showing the wooden frames behind the hemp.
This exploration is taken further with a group of freestanding wooden installations. Here, the support elements become as important as the deconstructed images. By altering and experimenting with her works to their most basic architectures, the artist questions the authority of the image as the all-encompassing contemporary commodity.
Eugenio Espinoza, for his first solo exhibition at Galeria Leme, presents two distinct bodies of never before seen works. One of them connected to the investigations after his first “Impenetrable,” and the other, related to the testing and development of his creative process.
Since the late 1960s, Espinoza has perpetually challenged, explored and embraced art historical conventions in his prodigious output of installations, photography, paintings, drawings and sculptures.
His series of “Impenetrables” are considered one of the few breakthrough works of the international avant-garde in the last 35 years.
The first “Impenetrable,” made in 1972, was a painting of a black grid on raw canvas, the same size as the room. The painting was exhibited horizontally, at knee-level, preventing viewers from entering the space.
After this, Espinoza grew bolder and started experimenting with his painting beyond conventional display methods and outside exhibition spaces, formulating an institutional critique based on the viewer’s spatial experience.
The first body of works exhibited at Galeria Leme is composed by a group of photos, taken by Espinoza himself, during his show at Conkright Gallery in 1973. On the exhibition, rolls of fabric, with a black grid printed on them, was accessible to the public who was invited to cut pieces from it and use them as they wanted. The audience used both the interior of the gallery as well as the street outside as stages for their own “performances,” while the artist photographed them.
The second body of work is composed of a group of collages from 2003. By using simple means the artist constructs a system based on possibilities in order to test and carry on his work, while avoiding getting trapped in preconceived ideas and safe paths. This small excerpt of his extensive work is not only an important insight into the creative process of one of the most significant Latin-American artists, but it can also be understood as a hint of what else might be coming from his still poignant artistic production.
