Group show in VUNU Gallery called "CANNY FAMILY" by Eladio Aguilera, Christian Bär, Andrea Martinucci, Alex Selmeci curated by Nikolas Bernáth.
CANNY FAMILY
Artists: Eladio Aguilera, Christian Bär, Andrea Martinucci, Alex Selmeci
Curated by Nikolas Bernath
May 13 - June 20, 2020
VUNU Gallery, Košice
Eladio Aguilera: Displayed artworks belong to the project “Why is it so hard to accept the party is over?”, where their sentences are understood as political elements and consumer spaces and are found in satirical, humorous, banal and everyday aspects of daily life. Within the artist’s interests, the formal commitment goes through the need to create spaces and devices within the painting. In this sense, the artist tries to combine the traditional pictorial depiction with an architectural and object approach.
Christian Bär: The impact of uniformity and homogeneity of images in social media builds the centre of Christian Bär's work. Posts and Reposts are the Base of his paintings. The repetition and mimicry of types of images are contradicting the novelty and individualism which the protagonists of social-media platforms aim for. On the artist's Smartphone or Tablet, he transfers these posts, graphics and tweets into cut-out-like, monochrome, digital drawings. The casual moment of digital drawing, the choreography of his fingers, the abstraction while capturing these images in drawings as well as the material uniformity, it all fascinates him. The transformation into a uniform digital drawing is similar to the transformation the images in social media go through due to their endless repetition. Christian Bär is not trying to criticize the flood of digital imagery, rather more accepting it and trying to grasp out new possibilities for painting.
Andrea Martinucci: This work says what the artist feels in a precise moment about his condition as an artist and his condition as a man. Working on the concept of impossibility, failure and fragility, he inserts a text that puts the reader in front of a choice: Adapt or Die. The sentence is dematerialized in four pages, loses its meaning. This approach is linked to Andrea Martinucci's works: what remains is a single point suspended in a totally purple page. Society requires us to adapt to certain canons. The error is not considered at all. If you are not in line with the common thought, you are automatically excluded from the game. The society becomes close to mass zombification. Zombies are used as a sociological metaphor. Through the myth of the living-dead, the victims are transformed into monsters, therefore it's possible and legitimate to eliminate them. The living-dead adapts to live in contemporary society.
Alex Selmeci: The basis of this series of paintings was a story about a fictional creature called the Indeterminate, which possesses various special abilities. The individual images depict how they can merge not only with the environment but also with the mind, how they can grasp substances of the gaseous or liquid state, but also foreign memories or subconscious processes. The Indeterminate can enter into any other being and feel completely everything in it, that is, it travels through different individual realities, but at the same time, its own identity has no clear definition. Through these and other abilities, it reaches beyond perfection and points out the absurdity of the pursuit. In the paintings, it takes a scheme of spirit that represents the variable nature of its form. All abilities are shown fragmentary and fairly vague, in a simplified or symbolic plane, and thus the main story becomes unreadable.
