Description of project by Ponce + Robles
50 YEARS. THE ANNIVERSARY CONTINUES
The power of water to retain stories, leave physical and emotional traces, heal traumas and resonate in the mind is the starting point of the exhibition The memory of water at the Ponce + Robles gallery.
The memory of water is part of a program that the Madrid gallery develops in 2021 on the occasion of 50 years as gallery owners
of its founders (30 plus 20). There are four exhibitions curated by four international curators with a common thread,
the four elements.
Five artists (four women and one man; four Americans and one Spanish), selected by the North American curator Susanna V. Temkin are the protagonists of this exhibition: Génesis Báez, Raúl Díaz Reyes, Frances Gallardo, Lina Puerta and Evelyn Rydz.
The exhibition incorporates works from various media, from sculpture to photography through textile art, engraving or video, emulating the ability of water to appear in different states.
With the aim of opening its space to new artists with whom they normally do not work and, coinciding with its 50 years in gallery work (30 plus 20), the Ponce + Robles gallery has prepared a unique program, which will extend throughout the year and consisting of four exhibitions. Each one revolves around one of the four elements of nature and is developed by a curator
prominent within the Latin American panorama: Tierra, David Barro (Spain); Agua, Susanna V. Temkin (United States); Fuego, Pily Estrada (Ecuador) and Aire, Tiago de Abreu (Brazil). The four have in common that they deal with the return to the origins. Susanna V. Temkin (New York, 1985), curator of The Memory of Water, indicates that “in this exhibition, the selected artists present works that make visible sensory experiences and perceptions of water and watery phenomena and their impact on both people and in societies."
What we find in the memory of water
Puerto Rican Frances Gallardo (San Juan, 1984) explores the nature of hurricanes, powerful wind and water systems with which she is intimately familiar. Participate in the show with three pieces. Carmella, is a collage made on paper with the names of the artist's family and friends whom she baptizes, borrowing the custom of naming tropical storms, because “it is presumed that names are much easier to remember than numbers and technical terms". The other two works by Gallardo belong to The Unnamed series and have a textile base - embroidered in cotton and silk on linen. With them he represents hurricanes that were never given a formal name to commemorate their "lives" through the embroidered lines.
With the Splash! Splosh! Ba-wooosh !, Raúl Díaz Reyes (Madrid, 1977) considers how water and the experience of the liquid shape language. This work is composed of the development of graphic signs, carved in wood, that invoke both symbolic and pictorial representations of drips, drops, splashes and other liquid behaviors to remind the viewer of imagined sounds.
Lina Puerta's Island of Langerhans sculpture (New Jersey, 1969) emits a peaceful trickle. The piece features running water that is pumped through a fanciful and faux natural environment created from found materials, artificial plants, and handcrafted porcelain inside a vintage suitcase. With it, the artist draws a parallel with the human pancreas in which several cells look like flowers, thus highlighting her idea of the interconnection of the body with nature. For Puerta, the body is an aquatic landscape, in this way, the hybrid anatomical and botanical forms of this work and of Cliff (also in the exhibition), influence this relationship. The exhibition also includes the piece Untitled (Turquoise), a shimmering blue surface composed of a set of fabrics, lace, velvet, sequins and butterfly wings, which recalls the essential role of water in the life cycle, responsible for both sustaining the life as well as its eventual decay and regeneration. As in an archaeological excavation, the exposed layers uncover cross-sections of materials and processes embedded within the work.
The multidisciplinary artist Evelyn Rydz (Miami, 1979), uses water as part of her artistic practice, turning to rivers and oceans as a pictorial source and physical material. His large-scale work Open Oceans Together / Apart consists of photographs assembled to simulate the flow of water through the gallery floor. Cut out in various ways, each photograph reflects the surface of bodies of water throughout the American continent. A similar effect pursues with the work Aguas Dulces / Aguas Saladas, a set of smaller collages that combine photographic images of marine surfaces and watercolors to allude to stories and traumas recorded in the water.
Photographer Genesis Báez (Boston, 1990) expresses a formal interest in water in its mutable forms, capturing it in some of its most ephemeral states, such as fog, breath, clouds, and dew. In the work Condensation (San Juan Airport), the dawn light is refracted from a condensation ring formed in the window of an airport, emphasizing the literal and boundary limits between inside and outside, liquid and gas, night and day, here and there. In Held Together, the effects of humidity speak of the ravages of time in photographs and papers carefully taped and hung in a window. The concepts of memory, preservation and nostalgia are further explored in the short film Holding Water which, despite its title, does not show water at all; focuses on two concrete fragments, painted in a cerulean tone, from the artist's collection of "water objects". The fragments bring back memories as they are touched and caressed. As the voices in the audio tell personal stories, the fragments seem to turn to water.
