17 EUROPEAN ARTISTS FROM THE CreArt NETWORK PARTICIPATE IN THE FIRST TRAVELLING EXHIBITION “MORE REAL THAN THE REAL” THAT WILL BE OPEN NEXT 21st JUNE IN VALLADOLID (SPAIN
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17 EUROPEAN ARTISTS FROM THE CreArt NETWORK PARTICIPATE IN THE FIRST TRAVELLING EXHIBITION “MORE REAL THAN THE REAL” THAT WILL BE OPEN NEXT 21st JUNE IN VALLADOLID (SPAIN
Next Friday 21st June, it will be open in the Municipal Exhibition Hall of “La Pasión” of Valladolid (Spain) the first CreArt
European Exhibition MORE REAL THAN THE REAL, curated by the Italian Ilaria Bonacossa and organized by the
Municipality of Valladolid in collaboration with the rest of the CreArt cities.
In the exhibition participate 17 European artists selected among 60 proposals that go from painting to photographs to
installations and digital media: Joao Pedro Trindade (Aveiro-PT) - Rodrigo Malvar (Aveiro- PT)- Virgis Ruseckas (Kaunas-
LT) - Lidia Giusto (Genoa-IT) - Márton Ildikó (Harghita County-RO) - Veres Imola (Harghita County-RO) - Marit Roland
(Kristiansand-NO) - Annalisa Macagnino (Lecce-IT) - Ulrich Fohler (Linz-AT) - Elke Meisinger (Linz-AT) - Mark
Sengstbratl (Linz-AT) - Radek Kalhous (Pardubice-CZ) - Ondrej Bachor (Pardubice-CZ) - Germán Sinova (Valladolid-ES)
- Eduardo Hurtado (Valladolid-ES) - Zygimantas Augustinas (Vilnius-LT) Adrian Sandu (Arad-RO) .
With occasion of the opening, selected artists and representatives and technicals of the partners cities in charge of the
implementation of the CreArt project have been invited to come to Valladolid and atte nd the opening. The exhibition will be
open until 18th August, to travel then to Lecce (Italy) and Arad (Romania).
MORE REAL THAN THE REAL
“Our world has been launched into hyperspace in a kind of postmodern apocalypse. The airless atmosphere has
asphyxiated the referent, leaving us satellites in aimless orbit around an empty centre. We breathe an ether of floating
images that no longer bear a relation to any reality whatsoever”.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
In hyper-reality, signs no longer represent or refer to an external model. They stand for nothing but themselves, and refer
only to other signs. Thus even contemporary art has become a simulacrum, a copy of a copy, whose relation to the model
has become so attenuated that it can no longer properly be said to be a copy. It stands on its own as a copy without a
model. Today we seem to perceive the world and its transformations more through digital representations and images
than physical encounter. Decoding information through the web, we are loosing the capacity to relate to reality and are
developing our emotions in a space of pure subjectivity, where perceptions are abstract and liquid. Thus visiting an
exhibition of contemporary art offers a unique chance to test our perceptions and our assumptions on reality. It is
surprising how photographs become more abstract than paintings or installations evoking a desire for a psychological
space of emotions and thoughts, while painting questions it’s representational vocation becoming a means that artists
employ as a performative practice.
The work of the artists in this exhibition seems to offer us a way of discovering the world by looking inside ourselves,
through the immersion in a series of microcosms that have been forged by different backgrounds and contexts; their
production offers us access to a series of articulate mindscapes. Their visions often develop out of domestic scenarios,
like the works of Lidia Giusto or Elke Mesinger demonstrate, each in their own formal language. It is fascinating how
they construct through their series of images, emotional journeys in empty domestic spaces. Their photographs do not
portray a specific environment or a recognizable architecture, instead, their work shows how emotions are linked to our
perception of buildings in which the human presence has in some way dematerialized. Physicality and hand labour are
central, on the other hand, in the production of Annalisa Macagnino’s blankets constructed by recycling material such as
wood or hair, as much as in Veres Imola menacing wearable fur neck sculpture. Both these artists use objects in relation
to the body in order to create a sense of disturbance and unease. Similarly Ulrich Fohler portrays a tactile sculpture born
from the assemblage of all the black objects in her home, which remains, in its bi-dimentionality, more sculptural than
representational.
On the contrary the seductive and frail paper-installations by Marit Roland or the technological spaces that envelop us
with sounds created by Rodrigo Malvar, project us in a synesthetic journey where colours, images and sounds offer an
alternative reality in which rational parameters seem to collapse. Process is central also in the installations of Eduardo
Hurtado that develops, through the contamination between video and sculpture, works that transform the exhibition site in
an emotional landscape.
Similarly the paintings of Adrian Sandu or João Pedro Trindade, are not windows on reality but develop as mechanisms
for the representations of micro-universes that become metaphors of abstract geographical representations, personal
attempts to order reality. Likewise in his pseudo scientific environments Ondrej Bachor creates models of thinking
processes, transforming art in means of representing of exchanges of energies and procedures of transformation.
The photorealist works in the show are clearly developed by ‘copying’ photographs of an original, thus turning a copy of
a copy in something that feels more real than the original itself. Thus, Zygimantas Augustinas and Germán Sinova take
reality as their focus creating disturbing human presences that occupy the exhibition space as ghosts that oblige us to
come to terms with the perception of our own bodies.
Finally the traditional genre of landscape painting is appropriated and rendered contemporary in the critical
representations of landscapes created by Radek Kalhous in which the use of pop colors and montage portray a landscape
in radical transformation. Márton Ildikó uses photography as a way of describing traditional representations of folk life
still in use in her region, while Mark Sengsbratl photographs natural landscapes as absolute examples of beauty. The cold
tone of the light, in his work becomes painterly and the monumental qualities of nature enter into a strong relation with
the physical perception of our own bodies.
After decades in which young European artists have tried through their work to question politics and national identity, it
seems that today, maybe in response to a general crisis, young talents prefer concentrating on the representation of their
own specific universe, through cryptic signs that turn all of them into multilateral mediators between reality and its
perception offering a vision of how contemporary art can develop. As a whole this exhibition talks of our complex
relation to reality creating a fluid space between what the artworks represent and how they represent it. Contemporary art
has developed now through a globalized art scene where languages and practices are continuously displaced, yet a
personal and individual point of view similar to a form of anthropology of contemporary society seems to link the
projects presented in this European Exhibition, as a crucial event capable of enhancing artist mobility and the circulation
of artworks within the framework of the EU funded project CreArt (Network of Cities for Artistic Creation). This
exhibition will tour Europe, in the following months, presenting the selected projects first in Lecce (IT) and subsequently
in Arad (RO). The hope is that the local calls for residencies and workshops published and shared by the eleven CreArt
cities will bring important new exhibitions and exciting new artworks across the EU.
Ilaria Bonacossa