RUBÉN MARTÍN DE LUCAS OPENS THE DOORS OF HIS STUDIO FOR US
Feb 6, 2019
art madrid
On Wednesday, February 20, from 7 pm, the artist Rubén Martín de Lucas introduces us to his studio in a public visit organized by Art Madrid. In this event, the participants will be able to get to know the artist in a much closer way, as well as enter their creation and production processes directly from the most enlightening place, the artist’s studio.
Since Martín de Lucas, trained as a Civil Engineer, he decided to dedicate himself to creating and his main line of work has been the relationship between people and territory. Starting from multiple reflections and using a wide variety of languages and techniques, the Madrid-based artist proposes to the audience to question geopolitical limits and the definition of property. Based on a strong critical ideology, what Martín de Lucas intends through his works is to ask us questions, encourage us to question with a great deal of irony what kind of relationship we have with the space that surrounds us, what are the true reasons that shape borders, as changing and artificial as the capitalist logic that impose them. These questions are explored through the possibilities of painting, performative action, video art, and photography.
A particular country created in the middle of a Castilian countryside, a microstate in the middle of a football field or a one-person republic on the banks of a Cantabrian beach; there are some of the "Minimal Republics": performative actions with which the artist intervenes the landscape symbolically. The process is simple: he appropriates 100m2, draws an elementary form in the chosen territory and lives in that new space for a day. Precisely the last three editions of this work are those the artist made exclusively for Art Madrid, three unpublished works that will be discovered very soon. This kind of action art always carefully conserves documentary material, aerial films, and photographs that become "poetic gestures, endowed with a mordant irony", as the creator explains.
These "republics" are framed within one of their latest and most striking projects, "Stupid Borders": an exciting project in which the absurd character of borders and the links we establish with them are demonstrated, and how to reflect on the processes of abstraction and commercialization of the natural landscape as well. The sense of ownership and the boundaries of borders become very absurd, especially in another of the works that take part of the project, entitled "A plot on the Moon", in which the artist offers the viewer the purchase of a plot on the Moon in usufruct. This idea is taken from the ambitious and supposed owner, Dennis Hope, who since 1980 has initiated procedures to declare ownership of the planets and their respective satellites, this way beginning in 2015 a millionaire business of selling ultra-terrestrial plots. These are works that, although in very different ways, can connect in their essence with the ideals of great artists who also worked critically with space, property and occupation, such as the famous "Anarquitectura" group and the renowned Gordon Matta-Clark, creators who developed projects such as “Reality Properties: Fake Estates”, in which the artists mapped those remaining useless plots that remain between houses, revealing the failure that is modern real estate property concept, which, as Matta-Clark himself stated, does not stop offering us "demoralizing memories over the take it or leave it idea".
During the visit to the atelier, the artist will make a selective tour of his artistic career. The beginning of his career can be placed in 2001 when, together with Javier Serrano Guerra, Juan Jaume Fernandez, Pablo Ferreiro Mederos, and Pablo Purón Carrillo, co-founded the multidisciplinary group Boa Mistura. The works that they made have a special connection with the so-called "participation aesthetics" because they are proposals that seek to improve bonds between people and the space they inhabit. In this often conflicting relationship, in which urban space is not adapted to the needs of inhabitants, even directly confronting current lifestyles, this collective modifies the public space with great vitalist interventions that have their roots in the field of graffiti. These practices have reached all corners of the world, from Spain to Brazil, Panama, Mexico, Norway, Algeria, Georgia or South Africa.
Possibly in this meeting, Martín de Lucas will also highlight two key events that motivated him to start his solo career in 2015: a momentous trip to India and the experience of being a father. In the same way, the artist can explain one of his most pictorial series, "The garden of Fukuoka": a group of abstraction paintings in which he reflects on "two opposite ways of understanding agriculture and life". On the one hand, the more natural, respectful and fluid way, on the other hand, the more artificial, unbalanced and harmful way. The pictorial strategies correspond to this dual speech: colourful and free traces in the first case, which pays tribute to the oriental concept developed by Fukuoka, "WeiWei" (no intervention or action in nature and the cultivation process); and in opposition, the lugubrious and repetitive compositions of the second path, the aggressive industrial system of agricultural exploitation. In these works, both with great lyricism, the artist's speech again questions our overbearing anthropocentrism in front of the natural state of the world.
Thus, the audience attending this visit to Rubén Martín de Lucas’ studio, Guest Artist of this edition of Art Madrid, will have an exceptional opportunity to approach the committed work of a multidisciplinary artist, better understand his work and talk directly to him.
All those interested in attending the visit, just have to sign up here.
