Combining conceptual, personal and archival photographic approaches, Iñaki Bonillas investigates the materiality and semiotic depth of the medium. Bonillas addresses the cultural history of photography to highlight the medium’s structural behavior and its relationship to the creation of identity. The two works presented at Arco 2022 were part of Bonillas’s last exhibition at ProjecteSD, Journal of (Un) remarkable events (2020). The works use a set of images of the artist’s personal archive, the amateur photographs that he himself took around 25 years ago. A mountain of negatives, most never printed. Bonillas’ main activity of many long weeks consisted in peering, with the help of a magnifying glass and a light box, at those small promises of negative images. A work more similar to that of the medieval miniaturist than that of the contemporary photographer. What interested Bonillas was that, due to the arrangement of the negatives in chronological succession, the film or the reel becomes a multiple matrix, which carries all those images separated by black bars. He, then, decided to skip those borders and build new visual narratives based precisely on the idea of proximity.

The will to see beyond the immediate surrounding visible world conducts Patricia Dauder’s work. She attempts to capture what is extremely difficult to retain: time, a fleeting moment, an ephemeral trajectory, something with no form, a remote place. Her work is essentially visual and procedural, a common feature to all the media she uses, whether they are three-dimensional objects, drawings, films, or collected images.

The mural work Sections presented in Arco is an installation of visual motifs arranged on the walls, works on paper treated using lithographic techniques. Duplication, overlay, and palimpsests generate images that have an effect closely resembling that of a film projected onto another image. Sections is very much linked to another work, the film, Insulana (2021), shot in the Azores islands and the artist’s studio. Sections was firts presented at dauder solo show Ground and Underground held at the La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona (2021).

During the preparation of Insulana, Dauder accumulated a number of images. Many were archival images that referred to the history, geography or traditions of the Azores Islands. At the same time, the artist was making drawings, which had to do with the idea of fracture, movement, superposition, layers. All this material from different sources, was filling the walls of Dauder’s studio until she decided to interconnect all this material to create a visual map where it did not matter if a particular image was a drawing or a photographic found image. The lithographic technique allowed to get a good definition in the photographic material and at the same time it had a handcrafted element that allowed the artist to control and manipulate the final print. In Sections there are images taken from anthropology books, tattoos from the islands of the South Pacific, books on whale fishing and drawings. All of them are images of marks or patterns that have been recorded on the skin of people, animals or on the surface of a geography. The complete wall installation is made with several layers of paper, superimposed.

Widely recognised for his conceptual approach to books, photography and other media, Hans-Peter Feldmann, a pioneer of artistic appropriation, bases his work on the collection and re-arrangement of pictures and all sort of objects emanating from our daily lives, in a mixture of ready-made and artistic intervention. Whether playful, sentimental, voyeuristic, kitsch, irreverent or poetic, Hans-Peter Feldmann strips our daily experiences bare. In an intuitive and spontaneous way he explores the world, captures and illuminates the mundane of everyday life, and keeps reinventing himself.

Feldmann began his art career as a painter, but he quickly abandoned the medium, not satisfied with his own technical skill. However, his “paintings” have become the most distinctive works in the decade of the 2000’s. He has become an enthusiastic collector of XIX century paintings that once belonged to the upper middle class. The way he proceeds with these works is very much in keeping with Feldmann’s general modus operandi, wherein his paintings are found material before being altered or “arranged.” Whether making insipid aristocratic portrait subjects cross-eyed or give them a clown nose, Feldmann’s minor changes are subversive alterations of the kind posters or advertising images suffer on the street. The Woman with smeared lipstick belongs to this category.

Whether it is a collage of photographs, a set of everyday objects, a tower of hats or an XIXth century painting with a red nose facetiously slapped on it, Hans-Peter Feldmann turns present into past and vice versa. And in doing so, he enjoys looking at the world in his unique way.

Dora García is internationally renowned for her conceptual and erudite work. She sculpts and arranges knowledge as a material in its own right. Using extensive documentary research, she delves into complex topics such as the history of the irrational, subconscious mind, and forges links with the great names in literature – including Walser, Artaud and Joyce. The oeuvre of Dora García folds up into writing, film, installation, and performance, as is centered around stories which she organises and stages, conjuring situations designed to engage the visitor and trigger unique, introspective experiences. The result of this multidisciplinary atlas is a highly conceptual and metaphorical discourse that addresses issues like the artistic dimension of fiction, marginality as a form of resistance, or the symbolic logics that condition our relationship with cultural spaces and products.

The Golden Sentences series began in 2002 with gold letters on cloth-covered board (much like a hardcover book), and continued in 2003 with gold leaf applied directly to the wall. The idea is to literalize the expression “a golden sentence,” a thought to guide our lives that is architecturally fixed. These sentences express a motivation, an idea, or the conduct of a person, a group, an institution, a state, or a family. Since 2003, Dora García has produced about thirty golden sentences. Typically, they are borrowed lines gathered from the most diverse sources. The one in Arco comes from the Diaries of Franz

Kafka.

ALP (Anna Livia Plurabelle), 2020 is a drawing from the series Mad Marginal Charts that started in 2014. A series of reflections by García on her own work, using diagrams, photographs, lists, charts, schematic drawings, texts that she first compiles in her notebooks to later be translated into drawings. Anna Livia Plurabelle refers to a character in James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake. The drawing gathers signs related to the meaning of Ana Livia Plurabelle in Joyce’s book and a list of female names, goddesses from various cultures, literary, biblical, and historical characters, which, like Joyce’s character, stand for the eternal and universal female. 

Ana Jotta’s protean work escapes any attempt at stylistic classification or typological definition. The proliferation and versatility of her work is her signature. Blithely borrowing her sources of inspiration from the history of art, cinema, poetry, popular and vernacular arts, comics and children’s books, Ana Jotta builds an idiosyncratic world whose modus operandi consists of dodging the rules. She applies herself with agility and rigor to deconstruct the precepts of distinction between art and life, the so-called minor and major arts by resorting to domestic and artisanal techniques without a hierarchy of relations between one and the other (paintings, drawings, collages, ceramics, installation, embroidery, stitching and poetry, even the decoration of the house where she lives.) Her work never ceases to ask questions about notions of authorship, identity and originality, as evidenced by the ironic insistence of the repetition of the letter J, the initial of her name, which has become the acronym of personal copyright of the artist.

The Ricochete series is the result of applying the sum of various engraving techniques on identical preexisting paper objects: unused gun shooting targets acquired by Jotta at a second hand fair in Brussels several years before. The forms engraved into these backgrounds are made using woodcuts, i.e. by pressing color-inked wooden blocks, in this case pieces from a children’s game also acquired by the artist at an antiques fair, onto paper. Overlapping these almost circular forms, there are others resulting from chine-collé, the bonding of Japanese paper onto another surface. In an inevitable relationship with the practises and forms stemming from the first Modernist manifestations of the early 20th century (namely those of the Constructivists and the first experiments by the Abstract artists), the whole results in a kind of ongoing composition.

Jochen Lempert’s black-and-white analog photography captures the traces of natural phenomena in every sense, in any place, in any situation. Animals, humans, tree leaves, landscapes or cityscapes, dragonflies, bees, clouds, grains of sand, swarms of flying insects, the sky, the sea, birds, the moon, flowers, water, the sun, are just only a few of the motives that one can find in Lempert’s repertoire. The artist’s deep knowledge of natural science (his background in biology remains central to his identity), his sensitivity and his acute eye, together with his awareness for art and culture intersect so organically that it is impossible to restrict the contents of his work to one idea.

One of the compelling qualities about Lempert’s photographic work is his ability to overcome the presence of the photographic apparatus. The way he observes the world and presents his work is so unpretentious and generous that it is no longer important if the camera was or was not there. It is his eye, his mind, that captures and makes the photographs with full freedom, unconstrained capacity to experiment and a sensibility rooted in timeless concerns.

The search for a non-singular “image” in favour of liaisons among pictures allows Jochen Lempert to express his work’s true dimension. In his universe, everything is subject, therefore, it is through a constellation of works that the diversity and richness of it is best visualized. One picture leads to another and then to another and then to many…in a sort of interplay between light and shadow, brightness and darkness, transparent and opaque, atmospheric and compact. And many more ideas for the observer to discover.

Asier Mendizabal has been constructing a remarkable body of work over the past fifteen years, in which he pays most attention to the relations between form, discourse and ideology. The question of the sign and its materiality and identification as a social and political emblem has a central place among his interests.

Overlays are also the basis for the sculptures in the Diagramas de dispersión (scatterplot) series. In these, highly enlarged and printed cutouts of various images (crowds, clouds of smoke ...) are combined with glass and mirrors on top of each other, so that the subject of each composition becomes difficult to visualize. Not only due to the assembly of the layers but also, even more, due to the interference of what is reflected on the specular areas in them. For his title, Mendizabal has referred to terms or tools used in mathematics. In the same way that it is usually interpreted in these statistical graphs, in Mendizabal’s sculptures, it is also the mixture of simple relationships between variables that becomes visually evident as overlapping patterns.

In contrast to this “dispersion” we find the small sculptures in the Condensar (condense) series. Made with industrial metal chains and plastic zip ties, these are dense, nuclear works, motley masses, closed, tied, that go against the supposed mobility of a chain, the linearity of a graphic or linguistic sequence. If in the previous a reference was made to the Cartesian of the mathematical graphics, here this scheme is broken to return us to a more chaotic and more organic space.

Over five decades, Allen Ruppersberg has developed his unique voice in conceptual art. He is an avid collector, a vernacular anthropologist that has spent years amassing an immense trove of postcards, educational films, magazines, posters, books, obituaries, newspaper clippings, records, objects and paper ephemera of all kinds. This archive serves as a regular resource for the artist, who draws, copies, classifies, rearranges and recycles elements in the making of his works. As he himself has stated: “The idea of rearranging my life and the work is an ongoing subject.” Language is a key element in Ruppersberg’s work.

Untitled, 2017, has as main structure a pegboard with the silkscreened image of a house’s living room as its central motif. An image that has been repeated along Ruppersberg’s recent career since the 2000s. It is the screenprint used in the celebrated series of works “Honey I rearranged the collection”. This familiarity with the spaces in a home immerses us in the artist’s personal archive, which he adds to the board in the form of laminated prints. We are able to see covers of books, comic books, CDs, and LPs, as well as photographs from LIFE magazine and postcards showing desolate landscapes, and titles from some of his previous exhibitions with no specific order. An assorted and rich archive of popular culture material that can be arranged differently, as each print can be hung as desired in no specific place or order. The prints not used are stacked in a specially made box arranged on the floor. The colorful design of the pegboard and box, is a look that Ruppersberg has used with remarkable variety for many years, dealing with different subjects. 

Christoph Weber’s work brings into play a reflection on idea, process and method with particular attention to materials. Process and materiality often in relation to natural forms are guiding principles in his work. His conceptual research is expressed mainly through sculpture. With resonances on the Arte Povera and Minimalism traditions, ranging from massive to fragile, generally casted with raw, industrial materials, all of his works bear a sensual, almost organic elegance. The work he undertakes on the medium he uses defines the object itself, the process or the “action with the material” appears intelligible in his sculptures. 

Béton brut matrix is a combination of one drawing, sketching supposedly a column, with three free standing elements very much resembling a pedestal. Made in oak wood and steel they are in fact one unit, being the steel structures the unneeded mould or protecting shell for the oak base. An interesting decomposition exercise where the notions of drawing, moulding, casting, and object of display/support are addressed.