Descripción de la Exposición
Daniel Benjamin Gallery presents Luz Materia, in collaboration with Programa Taide, a nonprofit organisation supporting and promoting young artists in Spain.
The exhibition features Spanish artists Ana de Fontecha, Juan Baraja and Iñaki Domingo together with British artist Jemma Appleby, recently exhibited at the gallery in The Light in the World is Without a Significant Plan.
All four artists share the same interest in the physical representation of light through different mediums, creating a dialogue between photography, sculpture, and work on paper.
Ana de Fontecha’s pieces are a transposition of passage found between architecture and art. She works with basic, pure, geometrical shapes and redesigns them to give the illusion it is useable and therefore a practical object. She defines the line between what is considered to be an architecture piece or art. Additionally, these artworks converse with the space and considers light to play an instrumental role, alike with architecture buildings as they create shadow and therefore, movement. The use of dark colours draws the sunlight towards the pieces and absorbs it. These pieces interact with the space around them by recreating the structures seen and creating a proliferating effect, almost alike a growing city when perceived through a bird’s eye view perspective.
Juan Baraja uses photography to capture a specific moment rather than the subject itself. Through patience, he waits until the precise point in time to capture the way the subject of his pieces interact with different elements found in nature such as wind and light. His creative process involves waiting for the ideal abstract-like composition to come to reality.
Alike Juan Baraja, Inaki Domingo fights for the purity and basic state of an object. To do so, he strips away colour to highlight the different textures, imperfections, and other characteristics. The white surface communicates the absence of colour and the presence of different characteristics which compose the piece. One of his piece Mirror piece shows a complete absence of colour and transparency, showing the willingness and openness to adopt the colours and subjects of its surroundings while interacting with the space.
Jemma Appleby investigates the subject of architecture and space through the use of black charcoal to create precise architectural shapes by hand. The use of this material allows her to study the ways in which light reacts with different structures.
At first approach the subjects seem abstract, but upon noticing the shapes’ smooth surfaces, the viewer notices a ‘real’ element to it with the light absorbing one’s attention and shadows confirming their authenticity. Continuing the dialogue between the artists and the space, she displays different angles of a staircase and records in what ways we can view a essential architectural element with a simple format and its different variations and versions.
Exposición. 19 nov de 2024 - 02 mar de 2025 / Museo Nacional del Prado / Madrid, España
Formación. 23 nov de 2024 - 29 nov de 2024 / Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) / Madrid, España
