Three exhibitions at Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB
Francisco Infante and Nonna Goriunova
Artefactos
Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen
After
4 paredes; Arancha Goyeneche
After winter comes spring
27 January–13 May 2012
Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB
C/ Saldaña s/n
09003 Burgos, Spain
Francisco Infante and Nonna Goriunova
Artefactos
Heir to the avant-garde tradition epitomized by Vasili Kandinsky and Konstantin Malévich, and landmark of Russian art for the last five decades, Francisco Infante-Arana (Vasilyevka, Saratov, 1943), son of a Russian mother and Spanish father exiled to the Soviet Union at the end of the Spanish Civil War, was one of the artists who began to create critical messages, intolerable semi-secrecy, against the Socialist Realism omnipresent at the time in the Soviet art scene of the 70s and 80s. His creative experience encompasses kinetic art works and experiments with virtual reality, utilising different artistic media like painting, sculpture, collage, and art photography.
For the last forty years Infante has pursued a creative path focusing on a geometric and metaphysical view of art, together with his wife, Nonna Goriunova (Moscow, 1944). He has aspired to the creation of a ‘second nature’ out of the multidimensional reality of our cosmos. This experience is presented in the form of an outdoor installation called “artefact,” based on the transportation of a pre-constructed artefact to the countryside, creating a new reality that transforms the ‘real’ landscape and which is then finally printed.
The installation of an artificial object, often brightly coloured and geometric, in the woods, by a river, or in snow, clearly outlines the difference, both in appearance and consistency, between the object and its natural habitat. This immediately establishes a dialogue between nature, the artist (the artefact), and the viewer.
For Infante and Goriunova the “artefact” symbolises the enigma, the mystery of the natural world in which it tries to uncover a “second reality” derived from human activity. From new images, metaphors filled with philosophy, that are simultaneously both fictitious and real enough to modify the situation where they take place, the artefact creates artificial systems that are analogous to natural phenomena.
Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen
After
The work by the Venezuelan artist Carla Arocha (Caracas, 1961) and the Belgian artist Stéphane Schraenen (Antwerp, 1971) digs deep into the conscious experience of our sensory perception and its gradual modifications through visual tricks, slight chromatic variations, and reflections, subtly appealing to the awakening of the senses and emotions. By offering a blend of the formal qualities of minimalism and the visual illusions of pop art, the work of this artistic duo based in Belgium establishes a difference between the visible and the invisible, what can be observed and what can not, and it proposes, on a second reading, a reflection on what our steps for contemplation are.
Arocha and Schraenen usually work with sculpture and photography, blending them on some occasions and also with other artistic supports within the installation format. Yet, above all, light, and the absence of it, is their main raw material: in their installations they resort to different types of mirrors (this could be glass or Plexiglass), which has come to be a sort of distinctive material in their work which helps to incorporate both the room and the viewer in the work.
However, the mirror is not used in a traditional way, as a resource to convene or to reflect one’s presence. It is used instead as a device for disappearance, a lure attracting us at first to its dominions so as to invite us into a more dangerous field, a different visual level, transcending the sheer visual one, and going deep into the psychological sphere. Their approach is not so much concerned with reality per se, as the fragile perception we usually have of it.
4 paredes; Arancha Goyeneche
After winter comes spring
Arancha Goyeneche’s (Santander, 1967) creative impulse is based on the reinterpretation of painting as an artistic medium. She is a Fine Art graduate of the Universidad del País Vasco and the author of a work studying the analysis and investigation of the parameters and characteristics of pictorial practice. In order to do so, she uses materials which do not traditionally belong to this discipline, mainly those found in the industrial world: adhesive vinyl, PVC, photography and fluorecents among others. She is an expert pictorial concepts and practices without the use of traditional media. The impulse of her work stems from her close connection to landscapes, by using a succession of self-adhesive vinyl layers on photographs she recreates the rhythm and colours of nature, and manages to evoke a thought-provoking impression, full of relief and movement.
Goyeneche questions pictorial support and, by means of a mixture of different media and techniques to which she also applies the use of new technology, she breaks away from the flatness of the picture’s surface. However, in her work as a whole, there is a latent and intimate defense of painting; this sets up a duality between tradition and modernity respecting the fundamental classical postulates for artistic creation. Thus, she keeps the search for traditional pictorial values alive, such as those of perspective, colour, glaze, light, volume, and the illusion of movement. The way she creates her works is comparable to that of classical painters, based on a consecutive superimposition of coloured layers, like brushstrokes that in this case are made out of vinyl fragments.
