Multiple Landscape.

Past event

The exhibition, conceived expressly for the space of the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia, is articulated around works belonging to the MUSAC Collection related to landscape in Latin America, works by Latin American artists as well as artists from other origins who approach and reflect on the immense variety of Latin American landscapes from different conceptual planes, formats and genres.
The choice of landscape as the thematic axis of the exhibition is related to the environment of the Cerezales Antonio and Cinia Foundation and its clear vocation in the development and promotion of the natural, rural and human environment of the area. At the same time, the exhibition is framed in the context of, and acts as a complement to, the exhibition Modelos para Armar. Thinking Latin America from the MUSAC Collection, with which it shares the desire to allow the public to establish their own journey through current Latin American art, providing a vision that rejects both a single reading and a conventional linear narrative.
The artists selected for this exhibition - Sergio Belinchón, Andreas Gursky, Diego Opazo, Raimond Chaves and Gilda Mantilla, Miguel Angel Rojas and Caio Reisewitz - consider and develop different approaches, themes and methods for dealing with landscape as an artistic genre, a practice that has been widely used throughout the history of art. Indeed, there have been many and varied approaches to this genre, starting with the representation of Nature, in its most sublime conception, and reaching the so-called urban landscapes that appeared after the Industrial Revolution, or even mental landscapes reflecting the aesthetic and philosophical theories of the early twentieth century.
The exhibition Paisaje múltiple (Multiple Landscape) aims to show how some of the main artists of the turn of the century have approached Nature - sometimes mediated by the hand of man, sometimes as a pure state of mind - through their works, and how the importance of landscape is imposed on the Latin American territory in very different ways. With a privileged presence of photography, this exhibition reviews from a poetic viewpoint - where the landscape, more than the representation of a physical space, becomes a projection of the artist's gaze - to a decidedly critical view of the use and presence of man in Nature, either physically or through the traces he leaves in the landscape. All of this broadens the multiple conception of landscape and Latin America itself that the exhibition Modelos para Armar. Thinking Latin America from the MUSAC Collection.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Sergio Belinchón
(Valencia, Spain, 1971)
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany
His training has been basically in the field of photography, although he has recently incorporated video into his work. Belinchón stands out for his particular vision of urban places, buildings, natural spaces colonised by man and the processes of transformation to which they are subjected. A taste for saturation, careful composition, perfection in the finish, the use of digital technology and the influence of the German School of Photography are some of his hallmarks.
Andreas Gursky
(Leipzig, Germany, 1955)
Lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Andreas Gursky's photographs usually focus on the recreation of urban landscapes. The sharpness of the photographs makes the smallest details evident, contrasting the two levels, micro and macro, that coexist in the same space. The individual is thus reduced, in contrast to the inhabitable context, to the minimum expression of a civilisation for which he is not only responsible, but also a product. In his works, references to painting are constant: in the composition of images by means of pictorial fields, the stains of colour and the geometric compositions around which the work is structured.
Gilda Mantilla
(Los Angeles, USA, 1967)
Lives and works in Lima, Peru
With a line that is always clear and preferably on paper, Mantilla's work displays an almost childlike curiosity about everything around him, but this apparent innocence, which ranges from copies of seeds and plants to illustrations of the incredibly varied Latin American fauna, also includes portraits of prisoners in jail, events and street happenings of both social and political significance, and all sorts of subjects in between, whether in pencil, charcoal, watercolour or colour, in loose sheets or notebooks, in series or individually, and also by buying the stencils sold in stationers' shops in Peru for colouring landscapes, where she goes out of her way to incorporate her own personal imagery.
Diego Opazo
(Santiago de Chile, Chile, 1966)
Lives and works in Alicante, Spain
Diego Opazo's artistic proposal has been characterised from the beginning of his career by an intense focus on architecture. The photographic medium, the medium in which Opazo develops his work, has maintained throughout its history a continuous relationship with architecture, a link that has allowed the consolidation and configuration of architectural photography as one of the photographic genres par excellence from very early on. In this sense, his work can be clearly defined as genre photography, and in his case as architectural photography. In fact, this artist has a double dedication to the subject: as a freelance photographer in different architectural offices, and as an author who develops his creative project around architecture. It is from this second dedication that the four works belonging to the MUSAC Collection have emerged, two of them corresponding to the series Espacios Latentes II (2006), and the other two to the series Refugios II (2006-2007). With the exception of his first proposal, Elhombre subterráneo (2002), which was produced in black and white and small format, there is a great uniformity in Diego Opazo's formal choices when tackling his different projects: colour, large format and the use of the series as a constructive support for discourse.
Caio Reisewitz
(São Paulo, Brazil, 1967)
Lives and works in São Paulo
When we travel, all five senses - not only sight - become alert and receptive to everything new that appears. Our gaze lingers on everything with greater intensity. The photographer is by nature a person of curious instinct. He searches and does not stop. And he even seems to have a sixth sense that leads him to the places he wants to portray.
Caio Reisewitz, a photographer born in São Paulo in 1967, portrays raw, raw nature, the sublime of nature in its most classic concept. The undisputed protagonists of these grandiose photographs are forests and plains, rivers and meadows, with all the force with which they are endowed in a country like Brazil, where the human character seems to play no part. Unpolluted natural scenery, almost utopian, difficult to find nowadays, defending itself in its purity from the action of man. Like a 21st century Ansel Adams in colour, he shows us the Brazilian landscapes with the strength that words cannot have and images sometimes do. This is the case of one of those photographers in front of whom the viewer can evoke a pictorial interpretation, whose model is landscape and theory, an exacerbated romanticism. Landscape as a place of tragedy, of melancholy, represented by mythical places impregnated with atmospheric phenomena over which man is no more than a tiny observer.
In nature, in the conception of a landscape, there is a confluence of characteristics at a certain time of day, such as light and other elements, which mark a magical second. Like a hunter, Reisewitz stalks patiently to capture that dramatic instant, a sensory world that contains elements difficult to convey through photography. In the spirit of Richard Long, who walks the land in order to understand it, Reisewitz portrays it in order to become imbued with it.
Miguel Ángel Rojas
(Bogotá, Colombia, 1946)
Lives and works in Bogotá
Miguel Ángel Rojas was a pioneer in the use of photography as an artistic practice in Colombia. Since the early seventies, he explored photography, which he saw as a foundation for the visual experience of the world, initially using it as a vehicle for approaching drawing or engraving, and later conceiving it as a definitive medium. He began to take an interest in photographic procedures in parallel with his artistic training, mastering the techniques even before he entered art school.
From his earliest works it became clear to him that art demanded a link with something external to his own means, unlike what seemed to be the ambition of most of the Colombian artists active at the time. That is why he was interested early on in pointing out the contingency of his gaze and the particular context in which his identification with the world took place. His attention was drawn to stereotypes of male representation in film, particularly cowboys in westerns, which seemed to elicit imaginary identifications associated with desire. But then he turned his attention to the things that happened in theatres that showed such films on a rotating basis, which placed the action on this side of the screen. Rojas decided to document such homosexual encounters; in many cases perceptible only by some subtle bodily signs or attitudes, or in others visible in a much more explicit way, hiding the camera with various devices and disguising the shutter of the diaphragm with some coughing. Because of the difficult technical conditions, absence of light, impossibility of framing, absence of focus, the resulting images are to some extent the product of chance and are reluctant to make visible at all what was going on in these places.
In exploring the condition of marginality to which sexual difference was subjected, whose only possible environment was the darkness and rawness of the cinemas and their bathrooms, Rojas gradually became interested in other particularities of his cultural context. He looked at the contrast between urban and rural life, the unresolved history of the colonial condition, the phenomenon of drug trafficking and the cultural effects of the armed conflict in Colombia. In the following decades he explored practices such as installation, drawing, painting, and experimented with photographic procedures, in order to approach the different situations in which these issues could be related.