Sala 1:
PARADOXIA
Beyond All Belief
"The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth."
Niels Bohr, Danish physicist.
The Nobel Prize-winning physicist's quote seems to capture our era. We live in a time of paradox—from the Greek para-doxia, literally "beyond belief"—where many veils are falling for those capable of seeing. Ours is a hypersensitive and contradictory age, a time of phantom images and flickering lights, fabricated memories, and synthetic dreams created by AI. The cloud of artifice distracts us from fundamental realities that previous cultures were better attuned to. Moreover, the artifice flooding our public and private spaces seems to have a goal: the production of a fully artificial collective hypnosis in which emotions and desires respond only to the market and political signals of a planned social engineering. Contemporary mass artifice seeks to replace our innate imagination with an interface through which global market memes can eventually override the symbols that spontaneously form in the imaginal mind.
Fleeing the normative specters of control artifice, I set out to explore mythology and the structure of the "hero's journey," as formulated by Joseph Campbell—from ancestral narratives to science fiction, an archetypal journey that we collectively seem to be living in our time. Many of these stories, disguised as fiction, seem to contain encrypted keys that our ancestors planted, like Ariadne's thread, to find meaning within a reality that feels more like a dream. In March 2020, when a global lockdown was decreed based on the myth of a ghost no one had seen, it felt like awakening into a collective nightmare. In one of my dreams, I was climbing a wall, and suddenly the wall crumbled and fell beneath my feet. I realized I was dreaming and, therefore, could change the dream. It was both exhilarating and unsettling. At the time, I was at the Royal Spanish Academy in Rome, painting a series on the abduction of Persephone and her journey to the underworld. Amidst a bewildering lockdown, it felt like the gods of Olympus were showing themselves again. They had not disappeared, they had merely hidden to stay in power. This discovery appeared like a key, unlocking the mystery I was exploring intuitively through art.
The empty streets of Rome were filled with banners made by children, with naïve rainbows and the agreed-upon phrase, Tutto andrà bene—"everything will be alright." That image struck me like lightning and led me to Goethe's Zur Farbenlehre on the Theory of Color. In the rainbow, I imagined a continuity between the observer and the observed in a shared process of vision. The rainbow has a dreamlike quality. It is a private physical phenomenon, as we cannot share a rainbow with others. Through the rain, each observer sees a different rainbow, though we have the illusion of seeing the same one. It does not exist as something independent in the world, or as an image separate from what is perceived: consciousness is diffused between sunlight, rain, the brain... and generates the transient experience of the rainbow. Like in a lucid dream, we create the rainbow. Perhaps the oft-used metaphor of the "river of consciousness" to describe the mind and thought is directly inspired by this flow that is the world and the interdependence of all phenomena: the Tao, without naming itself, says itself in its movement.
Goethe began the didactic part of his theory by investigating the relationship between light and colors with a now-classic definition: "colors are the deeds and sufferings of light." For him, darkness was not merely the absence of light, but a force equivalent to it. For Goethe, the two only primary colors are yellow and blue: "Yellow is a light diminished by darkness; blue is a darkness raised by light," he wrote. In this dark age, art can outplay artifice and, if we are able to see it, hold a living message with healing potential. Instead of representing self-destruction, it gives us the chance to recognize the light of consciousness that lies within the darkness itself. And this is the great paradox: the art that passionately fights for what needs to change is, at the same time, and in every moment, an end in itself—a contemplative act and an offering, illuminated by the vision of the Real. A victory over the past, an art where everything becomes present.
Federico Guzmán, Seville 2024
Sala 2:
Forma Material
Monsterrat Gomez Osuna y Marta van Tartwijk
Cuando la materia cobra vida se transforma en un lenguaje que desafia lo visible. Las artistas Montserrat Gomez Osuna y Marta Van Tartwijk exploran atraves de los medios del barro, la pintura y el dibujo, nuevas formas de percibir la materia. Medios tan antiguos como universales, se convierten así en herramientas que expanden los límites de lo tangible.
Marta Van Tartwijk dirige sus prácticas de barro y el papel con una intuición visceral, nacida de la repetición. Sus formas orgánicas son guiadas por la precisión y el ritmo, conectando lo bidimensional con lo tridimensional expandiendose atraves de los medios. En sus obras sobre papel, la repetición se convierte en un eco continuo e intuitivo, generando un sentimiento de meditacion desde el interior.
Montserrat Gómez Ozuna fusiona el barro y la pintura explorando las fronteras entre la abstracción y lo figurativo. Sus formas de barro existen en un estado de mutación constante, oscilando entre lo conocido y desconocido. La artista expande su pintura plana a la forma trazando y formando objetos que se aproximan a lo reconocible aunque vienen de su propia concepción.
En Forma Material, la cerámica, la pintura y el dibujo trascienden sus límites, generando un diálogo entre la forma y la materia. Este intercambio reconsidera lo familiar, transformando la percepción de las formas, y revelando nuevas maneras de experimentar lo tangible y lo efímero.
Montserrat Gómez-Osuna (Barcelona, 1964), licenciada en Bellas Artes por la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, inició su carrera en 1991 con una exposición individual. Su obra se caracteriza por una "ausencia de jerarquías", donde el soporte es protagonista y las formas evolucionan suavemente. Ha expuesto en Madrid, Ourense, y Luxemburgo.
Marta van Tartwijk (Barcelona, 1990) se licenció en Bellas Artes en la Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Su trabajo explora la relación entre imagen, experiencia y lenguaje, abarcando tensiones entre lo abstracto y figurativo. Ha expuesto en instituciones como TEA Tenerife, Bilbaoarte, Fabra i Coats y La Capella.