ES.ARTE GALLERY: CONSCIENCE, CONSTRUCTION AND REFLECTION
Feb 5, 2020
art madrid
The artists José Benítez, Marifé Núñez, Johan Wahlstromand Ángela Lergo, are participating in Art Madrid with the gallery Es.Arte Gallery, which is making its debut at the fair with an exhibition proposal where awareness and reflection define the discourse.
Social criticism, feminism, individual and collective conscience, construction and destruction, are the main subjects of concern of the four artists who participate in Art Madrid with Es.Arte Gallery.
Johan Wahlstrom (Sweden, 1959), describes in his art work the current political and social panorama. His first approach to art was with music, but after twenty years of a successful musical career, he abandons rock and roll and begins to take an interest in painting.
The Swedish artist is a great observer of our time. In the art works belonging to his series "The Art of Flying ", the artist draws human figures in backgrounds of faded landscapes. Meanwhile, in his "Abstract Paintings ", Wahlstrom explores and creates more aggressive forms between positive and negative space, focusing more on abstract forms than on the narrative image. Despite of these changes, man remains the center of his art work, and in some of his abstractions a human face will dissolve among the stains of color. Wahlstrom explores the tense world political situation in which we live today. His art work evokes the absurdity we encounter every day as a result of forces beyond our control.
The artist from Cordoba Marifé Núñez, has participated in numerous individual and collective exhibitions throughout Europe. In her works, we can see a reflection of the individual, collective and even universal conscience.
The eye that sees everything appears in the most recent series of Marifé Núñez, "Ángeles perdidos", emphasized as a neon eye (God) that observes the spectator and leads him to reflection. Full of symbolism, it is a reflection that goes beyond the physical plane, reaching the spiritual plane through the incorporation of the Man of Vitruvius, a perfect combination between the square, represented by the body, and the spherical, which represents the spirit.
In her "Ángeles perdidos", the woman is the protagonist of the events. An empowered woman who with her gaze, naive but defiant at the same time, shows herself to be a prey to banality and still aware of the power that her wings manifest. According to the art critic Marin Ivanović: "her focus on women as the protagonists of events is very close to feminist theories of gender inversion, which place women in situations previously reserved for men".
José Benítez (Málaga, 1963), depicts in his art works two possible paths for the human being: construction or destruction.
Through his fantastic beings and his infinite labyrinths, Benítez takes us to a utopian world, full of sublime landscapes full of ruins and inhabited by monstrous characters. In his art works, the notion of time and space is non-existent, organic forms dissolve and objects are complex organisms in continuous metamorphosis.
José Benítez's chromatic palette is reduced to the minimum expression. A special care in the drawing added to the dominion of the lights and shades, accentuated in addition by the use of gray tonalities and sepias, they approach Benítez to the baroque painting, more concretely to the series of black paintings of Goya.
Finally, we will be able to see in the gallery's stand Es.Arte Gallery, the impressive three-dimensional representations of the Sevillian artist Ángela Lergo. Lergo seeks to generate sensations and emotions in the spectator through sculpture and performance, transforming it into "a feminine message".
“Her creations, always linked to Salustiano's painting, are fed by the painter's universe. They start from the timeless aesthetics of his paintings and then fly on their own,", says the journalist Margot Molina.
