Ben Jackel / Durden and Ray
Sallot with Bevor
2016
stoneware and beeswax
21 x 30 x 18 inches
l sculpted my first large-scale clay helmet in 2009. I was inspired by what many consider the finest helmet ever made, Burgonet by Filippo Negroli in 1543, on view at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC. It was more than just the incredible form that inspired me — it was the contradiction between its sublime beauty and its horrible purpose in the context of battle, war and death. It is an object that speaks to the human condition, and one that has been with us since the birth of civilization, up to the present day.
I chose to enlarge the helmets to double-life scale in order to multiply their perceived power. This increase in size allows the helmet to stare you down and dominate its space. They become figurative without a figure being there; the armor becomes the skin. When I further explored this series, I realized that besides these works being about power, they are also about vulnerability. By wearing any helmet, one acknowledges that we are in fact very fragile and exposed to the violent world around us. That these helmets are created in stoneware underlies this as well.
Many of my helmet sculptures are drawn from examples from the 14th and 15th centuries, the height of armor production in Europe. I recently looked back further to create a pair of Roman gladiator helmets that have truly unique and almost modern forms. While thinking about that time, before me in the studio was my research into the helmets and military technology that our contemporary warriors, our soldiers, wear on the battlefield today. It is important to make the connections between these helmets, and the long story of men fighting each other. This is our condition; this is what we do, and since we will always be fighting, we will also always work to create protection for our vulnerable heads.
Carlos Beltran Arechiga / Durden and Ray
Here, Again
2022
mixed media on construction tarp
97.5 x 120 inches
Here, Again memorializes the intimacy between the creative process and the body’s expression and movement.
It makes a direct connection between the built, bodily, and systemic structures to question the policies that determine access, equity, and equal rights during a time when women have lost their reproductive rights.
The tarp used for this painting was used during the remodel of my house and studio during the shelter-in-place order in the spring of 2020. The tarp shows the construction tares, and scars, and I think of it as the membrane that captured memory much the same way our skin does with age as implied beauty..
Eva Zaragozá Marquina / Fosforita Madrid
25 Hysterical Color Studies
2015 - 2022
mixed media on MDF Wood
83 x 83 inches, (13 x 13 inches each)
The Hysterical Color Studies reveal the act of painting, as the beats evoke the fluid body. These pictures are the result of pictorial actions thattrain my attention on how my body works in painting. If we look at them all together, they allow us to distinguish symbols, elements, figures or shapes that are repeated and give us clues about my pictorial and vital restlessness.
The Hysterical Color Studies are framed in white, as if a straitjacket controlled each one. They are pieces of flesh from my flesh, artistic relicsthat I expose as the samples are presented in biology. They are unique and immobile pictorial cosmos that I present in a grid.
Gul Cagin / Durden and Ray
Body Fills a Void, Leaves a Void
2019
Acrylic oncanvas
48 x 36 inches
The word “carnal” usually conjures up sex related thoughts and images; however, in arts, literature, and philosophy it is used interchangeably with the concepts of “concrete body”, “body”, “meat”, “skin”, “flesh “ and so forth!
In general, when a living being undergoes a sensation, this sensation gets inscribed in organic material of the body.However, what is inscribed on the body is not always perceptible. Organic as well as inorganic materials andevents may affect the flesh of the body interiorly. Between the receiving and emitting senses, the figure in my painting re-configured as echoes of flesh in color, lines, gestures vibration, waves, and rhythm! They go hand in hand with the levels of sensations to describe the clashes as well as fluidity of the sensations of the living body.Various forms come to an existence in between affects and sensations in my works. Ambiguous figures occupy the surface of canvases in dynamic movements of the colors/ lines and the gestural marks to highlight the relationship between what is perceptible and what is imperceptible. They attempt to enfold infinite interplay between visible and invisible forces by disturbing the realistic depiction of clearly defined body contours. When it is looked at closely,one can identify vague figures with stretched paint applications where they dissolve into unsettling appearances.Here is the skin pulled apart in painterly fashion; the limp like forms is stretched and exposed going beyond the contours of the figure. These stretches of flesh in dissipating figures invoke, in a way, a sensation of pain, violenceand vulnerability. Rather than conceiving the body as a fixed entity, it is conceived as a fluid entity: the distinction between the figure and ground is no longer clear. The visual sign of the figure and its referent, the object/body,separation is not distinct. They bleed each other’s spaces, in another words, the body’s living experiences evades textual, verbal description.
Irene Zottola / Fosforito Madrid
Nobody is visible on earth
2021
cyanotype on Japanese paper, nails, magnets 20 pieces of 8.27 x 11.67 inches
Nobody is visible on earth is a visual proposal that favors an encounter between presence and absence.
The matter that makes up each image is the result of an oxidation process through cyanotypes on Japanese paper later intervened.
These anonymous and fragmented bodies move, but we hardly see them. They are sustained without touching,without meeting, referring to the fragility of the human being, of the flesh that composes it and decomposes it, until it disappears on the earth to which we all belong.
Titled with the verse of the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, Nobody is visible on earth, this work raises a dialogue between technique and support, loss and resistance, memory and trace.
Javier Jimeno / Fosforito Madrid
The Contract
2022
Digital photography without retouching 78 x 53 inches
This work is part of the series "Baroque Light".
“The contract” shows a stark background of what marriage means. An exuberant woman, with breasts that, as a sexual claim, call for motherhood. Tied and unable to move, eyes, ears and mouth covered, cutting off itscommunication with the outside. And above, the ring that holds the woman as an object of exchange in a marriage contract.
Lan Duong / Durden and Ray
Untitled
2023
Plaster, chicken wire, wood, vinyl, acrylic paint, plastic 34 x 33 x 24 inches
My sculptures are meant to be a representation of a deformed body that would be interactive if you could interact with them. They are the perfect size to stick your arms or body through, but unreachable as they are hung too high, or, as an artwork, are not meant to be touched. They have plush elements that refer to flesh/ skin/body and a plaster structure that could be a vertebrae or eye sockets. There is a carnal aspect to them in that they are notfully formed into any recognizable body part, so they look deformed. The skin is a saturated vinyl that brings the piece a dimension of fantasy. They do not know where they belong or know the nature of their existence.
le frère / Fosforito Madrid
Guernica
2022
ballpoint pen on sailcloth
726 inch x 457 inches
It is a mural-pen drawing on canvas that tries to reinterpret Picasso's painting to adapt it to the language, with afigurative, to the current social context. Feminism, homophobia, historical memory, cultural diversity, gender violence, etc. are present through the portrait of their protagonists (García Lorca, Syrians refugees, etc) traced through successive ink lines of 47 pens that for a year were creating the skin of this work.
Ty Pownall / Durden and Ray
Head/Planet
2023
Mixed media in acrylic case
72 x 24 x 24 inches
Description:
Equal parts animal, architecture, and planetary body.
Connection to Show:
This work combines feathers and fur with plastics and metal. I’ve worked on pieces like this off and on for years,always thinking about them as both specimens and topographical models, held in their glass vitrine display cages.A possible landscape or hybrid life form - they seem cautionary to me.