PATRICIA DAUDER (1973, Barcelona, Spain). Lives and works in Barcelona.

The will to see beyond the surrounding visible world, drives Patricia Dauder’s work. Through drawings, films or sculptures, she tries to capture and embody what is extremely difficult to retain and visualize: the passage of time, a fleeting moment, an ephemeral trajectory, a remote site, a disappeared space, imagined or in transformation.

For Arco 24 we have selected a group of works on paper that were part of her recent presentation at ProjecteSD, Interiors (September-November 2023). In all of these works, the artist has focused her gaze on the experience and perception of the interior space from a sensory and mental approach. Interiors that can be unknown or remembered spaces, places that can only be grasped through the idea of trace, residue or memory. In all these works the idea of organicity, of incompleteness, of evocation that runs throughout the artist‘s practise is conveyed.

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JOCHEN LEMPERT (Moers, Germany, 1958) lives and works in Hamburg.
Jochen Lempert’s black-and-white analog photography captures the traces of natural phenomena in every sense, in any place, in any situation. The traces of tiny frogs, the luminous flight of fireflies, a gentle breeze in dead leaves, a constellation of freckles on a shoulder… any poetic, photosensitive ecology of discreet life that is close to hand, but that only he knows how to see. 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. 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. The works documented in the next pages are only a few examples of Lempert's vast repertoire. All of these on view in Arco at our booth and/or the showroom next to it.

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LUCE‘s transits in the public space are not limited to ephemeral actions that erode over time and with the constant changes in the places. They are usually documented in photographic compositions in which objects that the artist has used in his interventions are often inserted. The two works that are presented next are a good example of this.
Ciudad Amarillo (City yellow) documents LUCE's action in an abandoned shop in the city of Madrid. The intervention consisted of obtaining a cutout of the old disused business' awning on which the remains of labeled words were visible. In this case the action was not limited to the cut. The artist subsequently acted on the rest of the awning itself by cutting out one of the letters originally found on the tarp, the letter "U", to sew it on top and add it to the rest of the existing text "cidad" to suggest the word CIUDAD. A double action that refers to the place of action and the constant reference in LUCE's work: the city.
Luz en ti, 16, 23 (Light on you, 16, 23) documents LUCE's action on an illuminated billboard in the city of Valencia. This is one of the first interventions that the artist carried out of this type (started in 2016 and completed in 2023). The intervention consisted of inserting a series of texts and figures as perforated text from the back of the billboard. At night, wihen illuminated, one can read LUCE's short messages, which respond to the context of the place and its immediate surroundings. The 33 wooden templates used to perforate the texts and figures are presented with the photography of the intervened site still visible today in the streets of Valencia.

XAVIER RIBAS (1960, Barcelona). Lives and works in London.
The work by XAVIER RIBAS selected for Arco is part of one of the author’s most iconic series, the celebrated series Sundays from the mid-1990s in which the author captured the spontaneous occupation of the urban peripheries of Barcelona. We have specifically chosen Sin Título (Flores) because it is perhaps one of the least known of the 31 photographs that make up the series. The work also has a beautiful classicism that links it to the still life tradition, without losing its subtle but incisive gaze towards a specific social reality. Flowers on top of a table with tablecloth in the foreground. Behind, an empty lot with a landscape of stacked containers in the background.
As Álvaro de los Ángeles* points out: “Ribas finds his in Sundays the fine balance between the expectation of the well-known ritual and the unexpected of the fortuitous encounter”.

*Quote from the catalog Flores y frutos, Colección Banco de España, 2022, p. 132.

MATT MULLICAN (1951, Santa Monica). Lives and works in New York and Berlin.
Mullican’s work is built around an all-consuming determination to understand the world in which he exists; not an object-centric world of ideas but a picture-centric world informed by experiences. Much of his art-making process is rooted in his ability to ‘enter the picture’ and perceive an alternative emotional/physical narrative.
Over the course of his lengthy career, the artist has evolved a unique system of visual codes to represent and re-configure a material world. Bold shapes in strong primary colors serve as existential demarcations of psychological territory, the symbolic representation of a proposed Mullican Cosmology. Each work defines a relationship between self and other, between the known and the unknowable. By repeatedly presenting and exploring his own intuitive visual language of signs Mullican challenges us to understand our own perceptions and to recalibrate what we see and who we are.
The artist recalls his 1977 Hallwalls performance Going to Heaven: “There's a ball. I am the center of the ball and the ball is all that exists, that is the known universe. And as my feelings changed the colors in the ball would change. If I was happy the world would turn yellow. If I was sad it would turn blue. What was happening was that there was a kind of a feedback between what I saw and what I felt. That was the end of the performance. It lasted about maybe two minutes and was finished. And that was really the beginning of the Heaven pictures…. The sign for Heaven is the target. A target which is the mind. What the mind does by itself, that is Heaven.”

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The Stick Figure drawings is a work of historical importance today, that Mullican begun when he was still a student at Cal Arts in the class called Post-Studio Art. He did not have a studio and invented an imaginary one and a character in it whose name was Glen. This was the departing idea to create hundreds of drawings of a “stick figure” in different positions, with a short, simple sentence as a caption, statements such as: “His heart”, “Trying to amaze me”, “His trapezious (raises his shoulder)”, etc. The representation of a fictional character reduced to the minimum graphic expression that, together with the texts that describe his emotions, his physicality, his daily reality, seems to come alive in front of us. As we examine the drawings, one after the other, our feeling of empathy grows. Graphic signs that trigger our minds to project a real feeling as information accumulates

GILDA MANTILLA & RAIMOND CHAVES (1967 Los Ángeles, USA; 1963, Bogotá, Colombia). Live and work in Lima, Peru.

Mantilla & Chaves use images as tools for dialectical confrontation with the contexts in which they are inscribed. Through drawings, installations, posters, archival material, collective projects and workshops, Mantilla and Chaves (re)interpret genres and traditions associated with drawing, cartography, landscape, portraiture or passtimes, and ironize the different imaginaries involved. Their work focuses both on the processes of representation and identification that, through images, allow the construction of a certain territory; and on using them so that these images speak of themselves, of how they are made, of their own condition, of their scope and limitations.

For Arco 24 we have selected a group of drawings by both artists, some part of their recent exhibition at ProjecteSD Drawings of Prisoners, others from earlier series. Although made by each of the artists separately, they always arise from projects and bodies of works conceived by the two artists together.

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GUILLAUME LEBLON (Lille, France, 1971) lives and works in New York.
Three works of different years and diverse media are brought to our showroon in Arco. In all of them the reflections around dual concepts such as inside and outside, surface and volume, model and object, movement and stagnancy, use and lack of function, are found. Leblon's work is a paradoxical reconstruction from life and art, that contains inherent references that are never clearly articulated.

The most recent one, Precipitation (black), is a drawing that was part of Leblon's project America where a landscape was subtly depicted through an ensemble of sculptural objects and works on paper that have been crafted after found broken umbrellas abandoned in the city streets of New York in the aftermath of a storm.

Contact is an early a work consisting of a pair of used shoes, whose worn-out soles have been reconstructed meticulously and have regained their original shape. However, if one were to wear these shoes, the mended soles would break. Having been repaired with polyester coating, they are not made to reach the destination. 

In Notes, the camera moves around an experimental space, the artist´s studio, that after being overrun with clay and water, is metamorphosed into an scenario where a landscape and interior space blend, while a set of objects and fragmented actions are sketched as if a performatic attempt. Hands and feet are plunged into the mud and into the landscape’s buried memory.

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MARC NAGTZAAM (Helmond, The Netherlands, 1968) lives and works in Sluiskil, The Netherlands.
His work focuses on the production of a body of work based on a main theme: the idea of pattern, repetition. His medium is drawing. Most of Marc Nagtzaam's drawings consist of graphite surfaces, in black and white. Abstract elements of architecture, graphic design, details from found photographs or parts of previous drawings are starting points for each series of works. Starting from this reference material, the artist reduces it to its minimum expression using basic and elemental means: points, lines and flat surfaces, to build a kind of derived structure. As the artist himself points out: “I’m looking for representations of a (seemingly) concrete reality as well as I search for images which can only exist as a drawing.”
The repetition and graphic structure of his works remind of a minimalist and conceptual aesthetics.

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