It has been five years since the first Cuarto de invitados, an exhibition event that remains faithful to its original motivation of giving visibility to more or less emerging artists related to Cantabria and offer them a space to show their work and somehow promote their career. To this effect, we also involve important local collections whose collaboration is essential for this intention to have a greater meaning.
The previous edition, En el principio era el dibujo, highlighted the importance of this technique in the very birth of artistic representation. This time, the protagonism falls entirely on painting as an original practice, extension of drawing to texture and matter, to the stain, to color, to the treatment of a surface -from the rock of the caves to the wall, the board, the canvas…- with pigments and different substances and materials. It is art par excellence, the mother of all other artistic formats, from sculpture to action art, cinema or video games. Figurative, abstract, realistic, surrealist painting… Painting, the expression of worlds, eternal reference. Painting, aesthetic experience, idea and concept. The invention of the painting, as a modern format, was a window to represent the world and ourselves, also the invisible through symbolism and emotion. Magical art.
Throughout history, the ways of painting have been innumerable and diverse, ranging from the simplest to the most complex. The artist has made use of multiple tools and technologies. Now that we are entering a new era, the era of Artificial Intelligence, we humans are creating machines with intelligence-like capabilities. And we design them to replicate us, to be able to do everything that humans do….
It seems that the «intelligent» machine, made in our image and likeness, is also learning to paint. Perhaps the new machine dreams of being less artificial and more natural.
This year Cecilio Espejo, Alejandro González Osés, Andrew Hollis and Mina K. will be in the “Guest Room”. They all speak to us from painting and tell us different stories. Compared to any Artificial Intelligence creation, their pictorial styles are their own and are loaded with vital and intellectual passion.
Cecilio appeals to the beauty of simplicity and the praise of synthesis with serene paintings that invite calm and harmonious observation. Alejandro brings a forceful, energetic, multi-layered plastic, building psychological landscapes of bold chromatism and geometric palimpsests. Also impulsive and spontaneous, but more organic, are the works of Mina K, which seem to sink into the original chaos to emerge brazenly and offer us the human pulse in its most accurate and honest complexity. Finally, Andrew plays with a deceptive figuration. Questioning the very possibility of representability, he relates motifs taken from old encyclopedias and, decontextualizing them, formulates non-existent worlds in a manner similar to the creative process of artificial intelligences.
At the entrance of the gallery we are greeted by his sculpture, which represents the artist himself in real size, covering his eyes, with layers and layers of raw wood superimposed on top of each other. Artist’s Index invites us to conclude, among other things, that every work of art is first and foremost an index of the artist who created it, of a unique and genuine human being.
CUARTO DE INVITADOS 5: La pintura, «inteligencia natural»
Cecilio Espejo – Alejandro González Osés – Andrew Hollis – Mina K
14th December 2023 – 3rd February 2024
Galería Juan Silió
C/ Sol 45, bajo. 39003 Santander.
Opening Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10:30AM – 1:30PM / 6 – 9PM