Adrian Villar Rojas

Sculpture Magazine-USA

November, 2009

http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag09/nov_09/nov09.shtml

Adrian Villar Rojas is an argentine artist who likes to be challenged; he doesn’t define himself as a painter or sculptor, but as an artist who wants to try it all and likes to work close to the border line; he plays the part of a director always pushing himself to the limit.
The artist constantly refers to the idea of making an archaeological installation as he pictures how the scenario of the end of the world would be like, also contemplating what might happen in hundreds of years when he’s no longer alive and all his remains, if any, still have a place in the planet. He wonders if he would be remembered, if it would be possible to reconstruct the main “moments” of his life like love, family relationships or his personal interests. The artist is deeply concern about death, time, loneliness, sadness, catastrophes and the human susceptibility to coincidences. He’s attracted to explore spaces and obsessed with the study of humans and their actions.
Villar Rojas combines impossible situations; time is the engine and not willing to let any moment slip away, he tries to capture each one of them in every ruin he creates or in the ancient fossils he mix with ordinary elements of our daily life. He makes monuments: “I make monuments because I’m not ready to loose anything”. An imaginary world becomes visible to the contemporary spectator, invited to interact within it.
Men from the Neanderthal Era, dinosaurs and all kind of animals, fantastic mutilated creatures deformed or dead, they all incarnate that world beyond human rationality where pain and destruction, but also redemption and persistence exist. Inside the space provided by the gallery Ruth Benzacar in Buenos Aires, we witness the end of the world and also the beginning of a new one. Elements co-exist in an incoherent habitat: photomontages, paints, remains of broken buildings, cars, a poor copy of Michelangelo’s David, acrylic butterflies, even a mosses with a baby’s figure in it. Chimneys built using construction material such as bricks, cement, sand and clay; water tanks made of fibro cement; enormous pieces of glass covering the floor; everything seems to play an important role in the installation but not in a dramatic way. They are all part of the surrealist landscape: “I heard someone said you could get hurt in my installation and I liked it because I thought the idea of taking a risk while entering in that place, was attractive”, said the artist.
Adrian Villar Rojas is always conscience of how compromising these kinds of projects are and how exposed he feels. He commits physically and emotionally as if that experience would be the very last one. In only 10 days he put the installation together and only the help of assistants was required when creating the enormous amount of clay sculptures, the small ones in cold china or the handcrafts disseminated all around. But more than 3 months of preproduction and preparation where dedicated to build in his mind, an entire cosmos to cover the 80 m2 of the gallery.
Prehistoric times and our present interact in a place without a real or possible existence. The ruins, the media, fantasy and reality, technology and handcrafts, life and death participate of a creative tension that nurture and neutralise each other at the same time.

Ruth Benzacar Gallery

http://www.ruthbenzacar.com/

Size matters?

Natalia Kempowsky
Sculpture Magazine - May 2009

The importance of the exhibition Size matters?, lies in the original way the artist finds to approach issues related with migration, human behaviors, culture and social relationships. Because these are those kinds of problems artists that lived in different countries, always feel related to. Natalia Kempowsky was born in Colombia, her family has German roots, and she studied in London and participated in several solo and group exhibitions in Colombia, London and New York. Size matters? is clearly one of those cases where the personal story of the artist, the multicultural influences in her work is more than relevant.
Kempowsky is fascinated with human behavior and how the environment affects it. The political, religious, cultural, and social context where a person grows is obviously the main structure that gives shape to the identity and personality each person develops. The type of art an artist produces is also a way of expressing the way he/she acts and interacts socially and how the world is perceived. Natalia chooses specific locations and study people’s actions: she photographs them, draw them, and talk to them; pure interaction. But not only those experiences are important, also the architectonical structures, regular activities, the ecosystem, objects that surround us, time and space, “information that let me understand social phenomenon and patterns in social development”, she says.
The wooden spheres are the original part of her work in this exhibition. Usually she’s not bond to any material in particular, she uses all kinds of objects, installations, and public interventions. She always focus around the main ideas related with freedom to travel and explore, nationality, humans, the dynamics of international migration and immigration, cultural identity, the environment. The spheres represent the different countries of the American continent. The curator designed a special place where they should be located inside the gallery according to the design of a “virtual map” which also relates the size of the countries in each of the several globes, with the concept of freedom those countries have and how they use it within their territory. The real size, the surface of each country, therefore, is not the reference the artist uses to create the sculptures. The main materials are recycled woods. The empty semi spheres are bond together with metallic locks but pieces could be separated manually allowing the spectator to look inside of them where figures drawn as if they were engravings, represent the most characteristic features of each country.
Next to the biggest sphere – the U.S - Kempowsky places small paper “people” who embody the thousands of souls that once emigrated; by defect, they also refer to those hundreds of countries people left behind. They hang from a rope, some are falling, and others are just standing and many close or in small paper ships. Spheres just present the situation where not only the size of the territory is fundamental because of its richness in natural resources but because of its content in cultural diversity. The artist develops a new map of the world, as real as any geographical map could be, where boundaries are flexible and redefined as we speak; the more each country opens its limits, the richer it gets because of the immigrants.

Maria Elena Kravetz Art Gallery – Cordoba, Argentina – 2nd - 30th July, 2008
http://www.mariaelenakravetzgallery.com/index.htm

Claudia Gherstenfeld "AVANTI"

Sculpture Magazine - March 2009
http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag09/mar_09/mar09.shtml

Claudia Gherstenfeld is an argentine young artist. She started painting, then she tried with ceramics, but her main concerns lately are related with sculptures and objects.

This exhibition, where she presents her new production, is called “AVANTI”. The entire presentation is related with humans. Shoes, clothes, everything we wear speak for ourselves even if we don’t want to. The artist works with shoes, objects and wheels and its relation with the motion of life; shoes represent the constant activity people have, the never ending circle of moving forward. The exhibition’s name, an Italian expression, expresses the idea of a turning wheel, just like the unpredictable wheel of fortune. “AVANTI” also gives us permission to walk, to pass, to enter; it’s a friendly way of welcoming others.

The idea of working with simple materials to give shape to those shoes that recreate so many different characters and individuals, is also related with the ordinary action of putting them on every day just to get started. Gherstenfeld wanted to show as many varieties of shoes as she could. The entire exhibition presents all types of alternatives for the spectator to easily find the correct option that suits with his/her personal story. Some sculptures look “tired”, other shoes look fancy and glamorous and some reveal the cruel or tender side of its owner; even the artist’s shoes are part of the exhibition, her real shoes left in one of the corners of the gallery the opening night of the show. And you can tell a lot of Gherstenfeld´s personality just by looking at those colorful high heels.

The support, the materials the artist used, basically paper, glue, and paint - but combined with flowers, nails, wood and real heels and spike heels - are transformed in such a way that the small sculptures look so natural we could even feel attracted to reach them and try them. And I also see there’s an interesting analogy between those pieces and the titles the artist gave them. Simplicity seems to be an ideal she wants to achieve, the main concern she seeks, but the paradox is also present because every title is configured in a cryptic way, far from being easily accessible: the title could represent just capital letters like R.I.P (not much more than an R, an I and a P) that communicate us nothing in case we don’t know the meaning of those letters all together just separated by dots; but it could also refer to the appearance of the shoe-sculpture. We could make the exercise of trying to find out the concept within those unpronounceable words, we could also choose to create the meaning ourselves, or we can just let it go and assume it is part of an intimate pact between the artist and her art work. An original way that Claudia Gherstenfeld finds to relate what an appearance could sell and how words give names those appearances; not always the same thing. As she said: “as simple and as complex as life itself”.

Claudia Aranovich

Sculpture Magazine
http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag09/janfeb_09/janfeb09.shtml
January 2009

Claudia Aranovich’s work is a battlefield, a dialogical relationship of materials, message, artist, and spectator. The pieces presented here were made between 1993 and 2007, in a variety of styles and materials. Aranovich builds a bridge connecting the past and the present, recalling our story as a society and as individuals. Each work refers to the organic: seeds, branches, logs, honeycombs, and fur are just a few of her references. Everything seems to be alive, in these juxtapositions of resin, polyester, glass, iron, and steel. Aranovich encourages the materials to nurture each other, to mix and play together but, at the same time, to keep their own identities. She is concerned with the power within the materials, and she establishes a dialogue between organic and ideal or geometric forms. Some pieces, such as the “Flags,” are a cruel reminder of Argentina’s social crisis in 2001. Made of broken glass, the “Flags” represent the fragmentation felt by people in this country.

The “Relief Boxes” enclose natural materials such as honeycombs, juxtaposed with words such as “future,” “hope,” and “security.” Natural life seems trapped in artificial structures, in a delicate and unified balance that brings the entire piece into harmony. Aranovich also uses photographs printed on steel sheets or placed inside logs and combined with lights to balance artificial and natural elements.In Aranovich’s work, geometry establishes a balance or an ambiguity between irregular and ideal forms. In the “Spheres,” exteriors made of materials that suggest perfection, such as glass, split open to reveal branches or roots—pod forms, like the wooden Semilla 2, made of materials that are imperfect by nature no matter what form or shape they take. The same is true of Natural/Artificial, a tower shape made of lead, glass, and roots embedded in resin that tilts away from the vertical to suggest organic, rather than architectural, growth.Aranovich turns materials into vehicles for a story narrating the tensions between human beings and the surrounding world, both natural and social. The balance that she strikes between perfection and irregularity summarizes human ambiguities and conflicts. Materials evoke memories while suggesting the origin of life. In all of Aranovich’s works, we experience the transcendent essences through an absolutely artificial presence.

Leon Ferrari: "The Musicians"

Sculpture MagazineDecember, 2008
http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag08/dec_08/dec08.shtml

Diversity is perhaps the best way to refer to Leon Ferrari’s art. The argentine artist left a profound legacy in the history of Latin-American art since he started in the 50´s. Diversity is expressed in the variety he chooses to produce his work: drawings, paintings, videos sculptures and installations among others. The variety is also present in the materials he uses as support: wires, plastics, wood, metals and glass; he works with paint, magazines, poetic quotes, animations and photocopies. Everything could become an art work in Leon Ferrari’s hands.“The Musicians” integrate a group of sculptures that the own artist defines as monstrous. The material that shapes the disfigured structures is polyurethane, which its particular characteristic is to create a hard crust when it’s solid in the exterior, acting as a second skin for the creature’s bodies. But in the interior, a complex net seems to catch the big holes of emptiness that represent the soul of those characters. Ferrari, going the opposite way of a fine Renaissance sculptor, instead of approaching the piece from the outside trying to find the sculpture “trapped” within, he works by addition.
Violence, physical and psychological, has always been a main concern in Ferrari’s work. “The Musicians” relate with the constant presence of tragedy, war, desolation; their appearance, those mutilated and deformed figures, relate with some sort of cruelty such as the massacres of the past and present century or the collateral effects of that violence that impacts on humanity. All the tension, the exuberance and the ugliness are represented in those bodies in ebullition; the polyurethane freezes de exact moment when the bubbles, such as magma, erupt from its continent. And all that chaos finds its foundation in a perfect, solid, inner order that lies beneath.This work is as committed as the ones he did decades ago denouncing the Vietnam War atrocities or the participation of the Catholic Church in crimes that attempted against the human rights. Here, Ferrari makes us face the cruel reality around us no matter in which part of the globe we are. Not only the “musicians and fancy ladies” are the main attraction, but the music that the artist specially selected to create the atmosphere that welcomes the audience – spectators. “The Musicians”, holding their instruments tight, create a mystic circle that integrates people walking by. They could look alike at first sight, but they are not. They are different from us and different between them; each one is an individual locked up in its own loneliness, a feeling those who live in the big metropolis could experience by being fully integrated but lonely at the same time. Where anything “different”, anything “freak” becomes attractive, scary and threatening all together. Ferrari picked Miles Davis’s music, the kind of music where breaking the tradition is the main idea, where there’s no comfortable place for the musicians or the audience to rely on and improvisation and melodic experimentation are the tools that inspire creation. While Miles Davis broke every rule of a “politically correct” music composer, Leon Ferrari works in the same direction: always trying to generate tense situations, searching for the awkward feeling and pushing us to reach deep introspection. Those creatures of an average man’s size, observe and invite us to be part of their show; from their “comfy” chairs and ready to start playing, as we get closer we realize they are not so lovely and colorful, they are not so comfortable either and we easily recognize the terrifying presence that reality that made monsters out of them; monsters playing an irritating symphony. Nevertheless, there’s still a certain resemblance with ourselves; we could identify that we also belong to that same unmerciful reality and that we could all, eventually, became its victim.In October 2007, Leon Ferrari won the 52° Edition of the International Art Biennale of Venice.

Rob Verf

Rob Verf - Braga Menéndez Gallery
October, 2008
http://www.sculpture.org/documents/sm-arch.shtml

Rob Verf was born in The Netherlands, a country that is famous for its artists. After moving to Argentina, his works continued to be exhibited in museums and galleries throughout Europe and the U.S.The work in his recent work captures his perspective on life and sexuality, not as an erotic construction of reality but as a strong presence that influences us all: the constant contradiction, the seduction of opposites and the complementary, a balance between body and mind, the essence and the superfluous, the inner energy and the visible exterior. Verf tries to create a complete model and in order to do so, he turns himself into a complete artist: he’s a painter that also makes sculptures, constructions, drawings, photographs, and collages. Painting and photography allow him to find the way to present in another format the torsos he constantly manipulates in his sculpture: they become the protagonists in his overall narrative. Verf’s fascination with those torsos is almost obsessive, he approaches them again and again from various points of view, as if reaching for an inner essence that is ultimately unreachable.Verf says, “When I make a sculpture-construction such as Woman in a mirror reflection, I do not only want to express the pose the woman is making, but also the energy that makes the pose. I want to use the total confrontation of the woman in front of the mirror: the interesting part in this sculpture-construction is the fact of it’s dualism between a two dimensional space (the mirror) and a three dimensional space (the figure). The painter’s and the sculptor’s vision go hand in hand.Geometry is important in his work because its presence organizes that volatile space where the sculptures seem to be suspended in the air or reflected in the mirror. He uses telgopor, plastic, papers, magazines, drawings, and paint to create thse mobile objects floating in an imaginary sky inside the gallery.To understand the coherence of Verf’s world, we must become a part of it: we have to participate in the illusion, play the game, share the irony. Verf combines his feelings, his doubts, his fascinations, his obsessions to show that the visual is always hiding something that lies beneath, something much more powerful than any representation of the outside world could provide. Verf is critical and invites us to assume a critical point of view. What we see may be the pure energy within the objects, or perhaps the contradictions that demonstrate that ambiguity is inevitable and we should look to both sides of the mirror to get whole picture, the complete moment.

Andres Sobrino

Courtesy Sculpture Magazine - April 2008
http://www.sculpture.org/

The Contemporary Art Gallery, Braga Menéndez, recently gave us the chance to get involved with Andres Sobrino´s designs; a young talented argentine artist that studied architecture, graphic design and communication.The installation might look like a retrospective where he presents pieces such as “Heaven and Hell”, 2001 (while hell is a black square based in a formula discovered by the English mathematic T.H.Willcocks, where 24 perfect squares could integrate to become one, heaven, even if forms were calculated according to the aura section, never reach perfection); “Diffuse Photographs”, 2002 (the idea is to keep the image out of focus so as to capture the light objects reflect); “Assimilation of the Circle”, 2004 (interesting proposal that demonstrates that square figures could turn into a perfect circle); “Crosses”, 2004-2005 and “Diagonals”, 2006-2007 (the artist breaks the rigid organizations with black and white diagonals that “cancel” or “deny” the function of those formal structures). And finally text, “Junk mail”(also playing an important role by defining what formalism and concrete art is about in Ad Reinhardt´s words).Andres Sobrino exhibits almost a decade of hard work developing autonomist ideas, now interacting while sharing the same space and trying to make some room for each message to be expressed, and avoiding the almost common tendency where the most pregnant designs capture our attention and subsumes all the rest in the shadows. Something is obvious when we look around the installation: Sobrino knows very well what contemporary art talks about. His inspiration is back in the late 20th century, assimilating techniques as well as the working philosophy of conceptual artists such as Blinky Palermo or Imi Knöebel. But conceptualism and concrete art isn’t something easy to understand or even like. Abstraction demands us to swim inside the artist’s mind and try to match our feelings with the ones the artist is communicating through his work. But also, abstraction makes us search in our own mind because we could choose just to consume the powerful geometrical figures painted with dramatic contrasts, or we could defy ourselves to dive deeper and find out what really happens to us in front of some of those colorful matrixes. The artist uses common industrial materials to create his works: paint, synthetic enamels, varnishes and transparent lacquers, epoxy, wood, zinc, aluminum, vinyl, different sort of plaques, multi laminates. Excellent combination to relate the spectator with his art. Sobrino feels comfortable with those simple materials rather than using the traditional ones; and there lies the paradox: casual material used to express sophisticated messages that demand our compromise to be able to capture the essence. Simple things lead us through complexity.He said: “It is hard to talk about my work, but I guess I’m close to conceptual art, formalism, concrete art, abstraction and color (…) Design helped me to find my road.”. It certainly did. Andres Sobrino has such a wonderful sensitivity that could balance concepts with pragmatism; he could create an environment where geometry seems to repeat patterns but when we look close, each design refers to a different story. Sobrino combines every possible conceptual influence with the gestalt theories that bonds our most primitive perception structures with the geometrical universe he creates. And we feel secure somehow, even while facing that mysterious world, we feel free and contained in those forms.