CENTRAL SPACE / PANOPTIC 

MÓNICA ALONSO

The magic of the hummingbird. Six desperate cases

Mónica Alonso focuses her first solo show at the MARCO on a single piece called The magic of the hummingbird. Six desperate cases. This work was born in 2015, during a stay of the artist in Mexico, and it needed all this time to mature, write, and re-write itself. During that year, Alonso showed in Mexico her work El colibrí rojo [The red hummingbird], which is at the root of this project. It is linked to the stories and magical rituals associated with the hummingbird in pre-Columbian cultures, and very much in line with the artist’s interest in the relationship between science and superstition.

The magic of the hummingbird brings together six stories of six anguished people, with fears and obsessions common to other human beings who, through a medium, are offered the possibility to cure their ills (each of them associated with a colour) through the death of a hummingbird. The artwork is formed by the reproduction of the hummingbirds as objects, together with the six texts that tell each of the stories. The conflict arises when it comes to killing a living being; and, finally, every pact has a price.

“These are the stories of six people made desperate by a variety of fears: the fear of failure as an artist; the fear of anxiety; ridding oneself of the presence of death; the fear of ugliness; regaining the will to live; ridding oneself of lovesickness. All of them try to cure their problems with science but end up resorting to superstition –in this case, the magic of the hummingbird.

All of them have one thing in common: a medium who listens to their stories and suggests they hunt a hummingbird. The medium connects with a shaman in Mexico and the shaman with a hunter.

The six desperate people have to decide whether or not to kill the hummingbird to cure their problems.

The artwork invites the spectator to make his or her own decision, faced with the visualisation of six embalmed corpses: the red hummingbird (love), the blue (anxiety), the yellow (failure), the white (death), the flesh (ugliness), the black (desire to live). Despite being dead birds, the hummingbirds retain their beauty; they seem to have been frozen at the very moment of death.

With this work, I take another step forward in my creative path. Much of my work is confessional, even working with other people’s confessions. In the magic of the hummingbird, the artist is the medium.”

Mónica Alonso

A3 PATIO, A3 GALLERY, A3 PERIPHERAL GALLERY 

ROSENDO CID

Everything that happens, and yet it is not

Regarding his specific project for the MARCO, Rosendo Cid says: “From the title, the key intention of this exhibition project can be glimpsed. I deviate from the merely descriptive to delve into the very fact of every creative act as a mere occurrence, as an event, being aware of everything that happens before the piece is completed, but it is equally implicit when it is finished.”

Rosendo Cid’s pieces and assemblages respond to this idea, perhaps abstract, perhaps poetic, using — as in most of his work — found or waste materials, some from his own workshop. We find sculptural and photographic pieces; some of them close to the pictorial, as well as others in which the text is a fundamental part, according to his notion that the word is as important as the piece or the object itself.

In conjunction with exclusive works for this exhibition, Rosendo Cid’s proposal brings together rescued pieces from other collections that fit in with the title and the working tune of this project.

“The basis and substance of this project focus on the very nature of the creative act as a mere event, paying attention to everything that can be hardly define by words –as it happens in a non-grammatical area– but it intervenes and influences in the resolution of any artworks, whatever its nature may be. An uncertain material that does not disappear at any time and that is still present once the work is finished, even if there are more clues as to where it was intended to go by then.

Therefore, the project’s title –Todo aquello que sucede y sin embargo no es [Everything that happens, and yet it is not]– refers to that mere happening or to all that invisible material, formed by intentions, chances, previous or foreign knowledge, mistakes, or intuitions that any artist uses; and which are not dissipated even when the subsequent contemplation takes place once the whole process is finished. Thus, a material that acts in any creative process or act, to a greater or lesser degree, and which we are never able to delimit or materialise in any specific way. However, it is essential to establish our certainties or convictions before the creative work.

The pieces and arrangement in the rooms will answer and nourish from these ideas –somewhere between abstract and poetic– using, for some layout, found or discarded materials, most of them from my own workshop; aiming at pieces that take into account elements of chance, of the process itself, and of the circumstances arising, thus arriving at resolutions which were not foreseen at the outset.

Therefore and ultimately, a project whose map cannot be other than the journey that has taken place until the final resolution and presentation in the galleries.”

Rosendo Cid

A2 PATIO, A2 GALLERY, A2 PERIPHERAL GALLERY 

SALVADOR and JUAN CIDRÁS

The Split Shapes

Since 2015, Salvador y Juan Cidrás form an artistic group that investigates the ceramics and textile medium from a sculptural and pictorial perspective, respectively. “Our work focuses on the shape and the concept of “aberrant”, something that moves away from what is considered normal, natural, or correct, as opposed to what remains firm — the convention — or is formal. The pieces establish relationships with each other and change, whether through form, colour, or their installation in space.”

The medium of wool yarn allows us to explore lines, staining, and colour by using the fabric without needing to apply a ground or superimpose matter onto it. The textile pieces exhibit the joints, the construction, and bestow fibres with geometric shapes and more organic volumes. The ceramic pieces explore their precarious nature, and the manual manufacturing becomes unexpected after firing for texture. It is precisely this quality for transformation which enriches the creative act with nuances. The project for the MARCO focuses on this “aberrant” character, involving the audience and provoking changing paths and gazes.

“The construction of a medium is the construction of a personal language based on the use of different materials or techniques. In his book One thing leads to another, Bruno Munari states that projecting is easy if you know how to do it. Everything is easy when we know how to proceed in order to reach the solution of a problem. At a certain moment, my brother and I felt that need to ‘know how’ with regard to two mediums: ceramics and textiles.

Thus, the first contact arose by learning ceramic and textile techniques. However, the exploration of the materials soon led to processes that sought to do things from the margins, almost a process of deconstruction of the medium; and a return to an experimental use of materials, where sculptural and pictorial language provided us with expressive dualities: obverse/reverse, interior/exterior, colour/texture, what is shown/what is hidden…

As the process became richer, the word ‘aberrant’ made its way into our artistic practice. We are interested in the term ‘aberrant’ as something that moves away from what is considered normal, natural, or correct, as opposed to what remains firm –the convention– or is formal. We understand it as a practice that takes convention and tradition to their outer limits, a sort of distancing of the shapes that blur the everyday in favour of the ‘ambiguous’, the ‘strange’, or the ‘mysterious’.

Catherine de Zegher (2010) defines drawing as a kinaesthetic practice of traction –attraction, extraction– ‘it is born from an external gesture that links inner impulses and thoughts with the other through of a surface with repeated graphics and lines.’ Something similar happens in our oeuvre: the pieces do not hide the gesture, and the creative process emerges from the physical involvement with the material. The pieces show they are capable of establishing relationships between themselves and of mutating, whether by means of shape, colour, or their installation in the space…”

“…The wool yarn allows us to explore lines, staining, and colour by using the fabric without needing to apply a ground or superimpose matter onto it. The textile pieces exhibit the joints, the construction, and bestow fibres with geometric shapes; volumes that generate tangles and shadows on the support.

The ceramic pieces explore their precarious nature, and the manual manufacturing becomes unexpected after firing for texture, as the colour and the areas that remain untouched or transformed are not under control. It is precisely this quality for transformation which enriches the creative act with nuances. The pieces are constructed in the need to improvise solutions: more clay, an inner reinforcement, the transition of colour..., waiting for the next steps to uncover what is hidden, inaccessible and uncertain.”

Salvador Cidrás

A1 PATIO, A1 GALLERY 

MAR VICENTE

Shadows and Colour

Mar Vicente proposes a specific project for the MARCO spaces in tune with a work characterised by the economy of chromatic and compositional elements, and by experimentation with the form linked to the transformation of the pictorial support. The starting point is the square, which the artist develops towards the third dimension. As its most direct volume, the cube adopts unconventional attitudes which, together with the changing lighting and the point from which it is observed, affect the perception of volumes and spaces.

In conjunction with a selection of sculptural objects, the piece for the MARCO includes two specific interventions in which optical illusions and colour theory combine to create new versions of the same space, generating different experiences. The audience is the active element that gives rise to different scenes, and who makes the experience of the work multiply and extend indefinitely.

“My main intention in my design for the exhibition in the MARCO of Vigo is to make the audience experience different states of perception of space and colour.

In Patio A1, the gallery is mainly transformed by a mural intervention which imitates an ‘architectural structure’. This geometrical composition is accompanied by a series of wall objects from the Serie Pitágoras [Pythagoras Series]. In this series, started in 2017, different shapes and volumes change depending on the point of view from where they are being observed. They are three-dimensional modular constructions that, together with the natural lighting of this space, allow us to appreciate the different facets of these objects throughout the day. We may re-read the shapes many times and always find different versions.

‘Shadow Is the Queen of Colour’. That is the title Derek Jarman gave to one of the chapters of his book Chroma (2017). I mention this because it concisely describes the way my thoughts about colour have turned and, therefore, it not only influences my oeuvre, but also explains the installation presented in the space of the Galería A1.

In the Color-Sombra I [Colour-Shadow I] and Color-Sombra II [Colour-Shadow II] installations, we will be able to experience some of the many facets of this harmony between light and darkness. Here, colour reveals itself as a shadow. Similarly, it is the location of the source of light that determines the shape of the shadow, that ‘dark’ area where the complementary colour to the source of light originates.

Mar Vicente