Another year again, the gallery is dedicating the months of December and January to Cuarto de invitados (Guest Room), a project that aims to give visibility to emerging artists at the beginning of their careers, aware of the tremendous difficulty of finding a solvent professional path with continuity in the difficult world of art. This project is also reinforced by the support of three of the best-known private collections in our region, the Los Bragales Collection, the Kells Collection and the ACB Collection, who, also aware of the need to improve and promote young artists, have each committed to awarding a prize for the acquisition of a work during the exhibition, with the winning work becoming part of their collection.
Estéfana Román Matesanz, Pablo Diego and Yeyo Riancho share their proposals in this exhibition entitled In the beginning was drawing. Despite being three small individual exhibitions, there is a common link in each edition, it is a tribute to the technique considered the origin of all the plastic arts, however modern and evolved they may be: drawing.
Our most remote ancestors already used drawing to communicate, to symbolically appropriate things, to bring about what they desired, to remember what they feared or loved. The founding myth told by Pliny the Elder is well known, that of the young Corinthian girl who drew the shadow of her beloved on the wall with a charcoal to retain his image when he had to go far away. The second part of the fable tells of how the young woman’s father gave volume to that image with clay and baked it so that it would last, thus giving rise to the sculpture.
In this exhibition we reflect on the evolution of the arts based on drawing, as the styles developed by each artist (painting and sculpture) are very different despite this common origin. In addition, the proyect room will be set aside to show together the different types of drawings from which each artist draws to carry out his creative process.
Firstly, we can meet Pablo Diego’s strictly academic drawing. An unusual classicism in contemporary art that will give rise to paintings that updates and modernises the eternal mythological themes of traditional painting with an admirable technique.
On the other hand, Yeyo Riancho, influenced by pop and urban culture, comics, illustration and design, starts with drawing with felt-tip pen, the use of patterns and the tendency towards horror vacui to create a labyrinthine painting, with an accumulation of layers and suggestive hidden worlds. Estéfana Román Matesanz’s leap is greater and very interesting since, for her, her sculptures are a kind of expanded drawing and must be understood from the traces that the materials, largely recycled, draw in the air, their hollow parts and the colour of the fabrics that, like paint, complete the figure in space.
CUARTO DE INVITADOS 4: En el principio era el dibujo
15 December, 2022 – 31 January, 2023
Estéfana Román Matesanz
Pablo Diego
Yeyo Riancho
Galería Juan Silió
C/ Sol 45, bajo. 39003 Santander.
Opening Hours:
Tuesday – Saturday,
10.30AM – 1.30PM
6–9PM