João Mouro / Rafael Reverón-Pojan

Opening: May 22nd 2013, 7 pm
Opening Speech: Hartwig Knack, art historian, curator and writer

Exhibition: May 23rd 2013 – July 13th 2013

João Mouro (born in 1985 in Faro, Portugal) has chosen one of most difficult ways to work: to start from materials whose origins we identify as fragments of aesthetic and functional objects, to elaborate with them object-sculptures that offer us at a time reality and impossibility and doing that from an intermediate scale far beyond the evocation or the monument. This scale separates him from the heirs of historic collage as well as from the constructive sculpture of the 70s and 80s, while his method when constructing his pieces reveals him as inquisitive, intuitive and solitary.

Taking into account those materials he starts from it would be customary to propose sculptures settled on a strong constructive character, small evocative pieces, proposals based on reflecting a symbolic content or energy situations. However, Joâo Mouro, seems to be determined to let us see the planning, the process and the result, without hiding anything, even inviting the spectator’s curiosity to discover the secret side, the mystery concealed in each piece. His most habitual manner is to extend and divide up spaces so to set up windows by which to make the object alive from an ironic mood that has a lot to do with post-dadaism. With a nearly caustic sense of humour he calls it windowism, a clear wink at that spirit in the vanguards when they knew how to be both collective and solitary.

Rafael Reverón-Pojan (Caracas, 1969) is not an easy artist either to see or to follow. His rather scarce public projection is difficult to understand if we take into account the quality of his proposal that hides the rigorous, reflexive, precise and disturbing work of an artist that insists on thinking about problems of perception and visual language and on defining the characteristic sense of each project. An artist that is concerned about revealing the internal order of things and also about offering images that have as much synthesis as thought and as much final conclusion as beginning. His works tend to small scale and conciseness and, however, they behave as real microcosms or as independent universes. Whoever approaches his works of art perceives a double sensation: on the one hand, a liking for textures and the epidermis that can be felt as close; on the other hand a set of references, personal and apparently hermetic. The impression is completed as soon as the spectator becomes active and wonders about the order and sense of what it is being looked at.

Reverón-Pojan chooses fragile materials that he works up in order to give them consistence and a highly aesthetic sense. He starts from evocations or slight visual references that almost immediately he lightens searching to give levity to his objects as well as independence and an autonomous character. He has several factors in favour: he knows the materials he is working with very well and knows that his axis is what we could call intermediate spaces in which we doubt if it is dealing with an interior or an exterior or if we are perceiving the object from above or from below it.

Excerpts: Miguel Fernandez-Cid, Curator Galeria Astarte, Madrid