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Madrid has a new art gallery, born in times of pandemic, confinement and business risk. Alejandro de Villota, son of the Madrid painter and sculptor Javier de Villota and cousin of the pilot Maria de Villota has opened this newly born artistic space in Madrid’s calle Piedmont 19 and has inaugurated it with an exhibition that goes by the name of ‘Punishment’, a reflection on the experience of the individual during confinement, which can be visited until January 20.
“It is the first exhibition script proposed by Galería Memoria in its cultural landing in Madrid, in which 15 international artists participate, and which aims to be an introspective mirror for a viewer who has been a victim of powerlessness and defenselessness, in turn influencing resilience, freedom, contemplation and the citizen’s search for self-realization, “they explain from the gallery.
A proposal around human learning and conditioning – starting from the Pavlovian theories– which aims to invite consideration of how environmental stimuli affect behavior, the different reactions that positive and punitive stimuli provoke.
“The plot tension of all of the above begins in the contrasting spot colors of the serigraphs of Rafael Canogar, which receive the visitor at the entrance to Galería Memoria as a polyptych giving title to the present exhibition story, “they explain in Galería Memoria.” dichotomy of testimonies that do not find a homogeneous aesthetic or chromatic thread and that cannot be fully resolved in the exhibition plan. Instead, the semantic, introspective, and symbolic value of the images becomes protagonist, while their interpretation and meaning remain open. An example of this are the naive compositions of the peasants of the Solentiname Archipelago of the seventies, presented together with the syncretic sculptures of the recently late poet Ernesto Cardenal, in conversation with a deconstructive sculpture by Mexican Abraham Cruzvillegas, who intervened in the Turbine Room of the Tate Modern in 2015 “.
“The exhibition continues arrhythmically with the clinical documents on Alzheimer’s by Rafael Díaz converted into conceptual art, the radiographic studies of the also Salvadoran Muriel Hasbun, the ‘Duelo’ (1898) by Joaquín Torres García, the longed-for grid of the city of Vicente Rojo or the stolen scenes from the daily tumult of Javier de Villota in his “I saw him”, and this too and again Canogar with his ‘Cacheo’, (1973). The perspective is then dislocated with the photography of Daniel Silvo and his Satirical allusion to other historical quarantines such as the nuclear quarantine of the 1940s and 1950s. For their part, Mexican photographers Graciela Iturbide and Yolanda Andrade capture a decisive moment of Eros Thanatos in a kind of catharsis “. And he ends: “In that disruption is when Chema Madoz appears to open the possibility by stopping the unrepresentable. The viewer and the collective experience are activated in this show that is detached from the political “.
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