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 sculpture Weather Sticks was first shown at the XIV Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador (2019) curated by Jesús Fuenmayor. The ethos of the exhibition was to propose a reflection on art as a plural experience: esthetic, sensorial, intellectual, emotional, affective, psychological, as much as political, social and anthropological. Dauder worked with clay and pigments so that when mixed and baked at low temperature, these would react to the environment, absorving its humidity. For several weeks, the “sticks” were partly half-buried in the ground of a courtyard in Cuenca and the weather changes during that time got "imprinted" on the ceramic surface, leaving some visible permanent marks like darker spots and sinuous lines on their surface.

Whale Lines and Marquesas Patrón V, belong to the series Sections. They are 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. The motifs in Sections were the result of accumulating a number of images that Dauder was preparing for her film Insulana. Many were archival images that referred to the history, geography or traditions of the Azores Islands. Some were images taken from anthropology books, tattoos from the islands of the South Pacific, books on whale fishing. Others are the artist’s own drawings deal with the idea of fracture, movement, superposition, layers.  or patterns that have been recorded on the skin of people, animals or on the surface of a geography. Dauder decided to interconnect all this material, it did not matter if a particular image was a drawing or a photographic found image. The lithographic technique allowed to get a goof 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. Untitled is a more recent original drawing that fits the ideas expressed in the works part of Sections. Thus, it dialogues perfectly with the rest of works in the booth.

Koenraad Dedobbeleer's work uncovers the surprising in the familiar. As an attentive observer of reality, the artist bases his work on the presentation of objects and spaces which accommodate tenuous transformations. His objects, sculptures and photographs are the result of his very subjective contemplation of the urban and architectural fabric of our daily environment.

The motifs in these photographs are quite simple or banal objects that by the process of photographic reproduction are turned into sculptural entities. Most of them have an almost ageless but archaic feel, even ethnographic in some cases. The images are first made with an iPhone, they are quick, fairly uncomposed snapshots, mostly taken as a way to help the artist remember something he saw and found interesting, almost like taking a note. Later, with an analogue technical camera (a Sinar P2, 4x5 to be precise) he rephotographs these images directly from the computer screen. Although what we see are nicely framed gelatin silver prints, one might feel that this sort of image could not be realized with the technical camera. 

The sculptural work Instincts are Ahead of the Mind, a table, serves as the base to display some of Portuguse artist Ana Jotta's works, in a quite unconventional and interesting arrangement.

Ana Jotta’s work escapes any attempt at stylistic classification or typological definition. Blithely borrowing her sources of inspiration from the history of art, cinema, poetry, popular and vernacular arts, comics and children’s books, Ana Jotta 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. Painting, drawing, collage, ceramics, embroidery, stitching and poetry are all equally inportant in Jotta's artistic parcours. Her work never ceases to ask questions about notions of authorship, identity and originality.

The area given to Jotta in our booth is conceived as a small space where an ecclectic combination of artworks in different media are dispalyed in a modest non opulent presentation. Some of her objectual works will be laid out on a table which is indeed a work by Belgian artist Koenraad Deddobeleer. This will be put together with an earlier painting of her series Grandes Mestres da Literatura Policial (2010) and some of her most recent objects of the Os Plastificados series (2019).

The artist book Un jour sans pain* est un jour sans soleil [“A day without bread is a day without sun”], sounds like a typical French saying, but the asterisk complicates things a little: on the back of the leporello, the artist instructs us to read “pain” in the English, thus adding a sarcastic touch to this commercial motto. The (absence of) sun and the umbrella can refer to the tsuyu, the rainy season during which they were exhibited In Japan, in the open air. 

The Plastificados (the Plastified) is a set of works on paper presented in display stands. This is an open series in Jotta’s body of work. Conceived by the artist as a visual equivalent of footnotes or quotes in a visual diary of sorts, they trace, sketch, record, and play with words, signs, colors and ideas.

Jochen Lempert’s (Hamburg, 1958) 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. The artist puts into perspective the complex articulations between the aesthetic and the political, and reconsiders the legacies, the possibilities, but also the failures, of the tradition of sculpture as a monument, or certain historical artistic vanguards. Even though abstract sculpture is his most representative register, Mendizabal’s work unfolds in any number of other mediums, from film to silkscreen, from flags to photographic series and collages, always with an instinctive feel for sculptural and graphic form.

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.

“To be immersed in colour. That is the experience proposed by Pieter Vermeersch”, points out French curator François Piron (1). And it is, indeed, an experience of complete immersion what the Flemish painter’s work offers. Either through mural paintings but also in his works on canvas, or other surfaces, Vermeersch manages to elicit a powerful relationship between the work and the viewer.

(1)To Be Immersed in Colour. François Piron in Variations, Ludion Publishers, 2019

Vermeersch is best known for his “colour-graded” paintings which are the result of blending a large number of colours in such a perfectly uniform and smooth finish that the separation from one colour to the next, can no longer be perceived, it disappears. The melding of the multiple tonalities creates a blurred effect in a sort of infinitude. 

Together with one new painting, we present some new small works on petrified wood. To these stones, found surfaces with their own high level of pictorial composition, the artist adds an image, or better, a part of an image. If in earlier works Vermeersch has used marble or other types of natural stones to simply add touches of paint in a quite reductive gesture, what he does now is more complex. The process implies screen-printing on the raw stone a photograph of itself turned into a grid of dots. The result is a blurred picture, or, we can still call it a painting, where the natural quality of the surface is, paradoxically, in tune with the screen-printing ink. By printing on the stone, Vermeersch activates its temporal dimension and adds a new layer, that of the present.

Colour fading into light and then into space. Matter becoming image. Vermeersch’s work translates into a unique physical experience that cannot be encoded in any discourse.