ORÍGENES
March 31 - May 20, 2022
Little River, Miami
“Orígenes” gathers three artistic proposals characterized by their singularity and consistency. Mariana Ferrari, François Thevenet and Martín Touzón, present pictorial and installation works that assume visual creation as an exploratory resource.
“Orígenes” – Mariana Ferrari, François Thevenet, Martín Touzón
By Félix Suazo.
Every beginning is a manifestation of intentions that seek to distinguish themselves in a heteroclite environment. Tomas Redrado Art Gallery does the same in the inaugural exhibition of its space, where it gathers three artistic proposals characterized by their singularity and consistency. Mariana Ferrari, François Thevenet and Martín Touzón, all from Argentina, are the artists who participate in the initial conclave of a gallery project that brings a renewing profile to the Miami art scene. The show is made up of pictorial and installation works that assume visual creation as an exploratory resource. They are confronted visions, oriented to the deconstruction of processes, the narrative articulation of contrasting situations and the sensitive recording of complex experiences. Consequently, the selected works offer a plural look at the different media, supports and ideas that make up the current artistic panorama. The work of Mariana Ferrari, a native of Tucumán who lives in Buenos Aires, reflects on painting and context. Her work has to do with the appropriation of space, as well as with the empowerment of gesture and its conceptual implications. More than an object, painting becomes a performative experience that feeds on the environment. Canvas and wall form an expanded surface, without precise borders, within whose perimeter pigments and other materials accumulate. For her, what pre-exists in the site and the work are constructions that emerge from the reasoned interaction of their material and intellectual TOMAS REDRADO ART 8163 NE 2nd Ave, Miami, FL meaning. Consequently, her work explodes the assumptions of conventional painting, moving towards the corporeal; at the same time she leaves there the physical imprint of her work. It is a painting of testimony, whose findings are nourished by the spontaneous. The work of François Thevenet, born in Viey, France and resident in Buenos Aires for several years, is defined by its tonal intensity, with fluctuating ranges and moments of strong contrast. His pictorial work displays a rustic iconicity, structured on the basis of graphic, biomorphic and urban elements where myths, conflicts and celebrations intersect. There, archangels, caps, sports shoes, trees, animals and people cohabit in perfect fusion. With this repertoire, the artist evokes a dualism that is vital and symbolic at the same time, juxtaposing reminiscences of his native city among the Pyrenean mountains and stories that have their roots in the city of Buenos Aires. Everything superimposed —reality and legend, past and present, goodness and evil— as if there were no distinction or hierarchy between the figures and their surroundings.
Seen as a whole, the exhibition of Mariana Ferrari, François Thevenet and Martín Touzón at Tomas Redrado Art Gallery has a flexible articulation, sustained by several binding notions. On the one hand, color as the starting point of an expressive dialogue where neutral shades, deep blues and fluorescent tones alternate, according to the range used by each author. On the other hand, the artistic support as an intersection of incongruent realities where urban frenzy, natural plenitude, nocturnality and neon are juxtaposed. As a third aspect, movement as action and representation, an idea manifested in the rhythmic contiguity of the figures and the dull panting of the bodies as they approach or come into contact with the surface of the work. Finally, the return to the primary and the elemental as a triggering factor, an issue that is evident in the gestures and signs, but also in the organic voluptuousness of textures, vegetation and chrome circles. Following these clues, a rich constellation of coincidences and analogies emerges, which create a dialogue between the exhibited works and define the deep meaning of this exhibition. In short, the works by Mariana Ferrari, François Thevenet and Martín Touzón corroborate the plurality of procedures, practices and aesthetics that characterize contemporary art. All of them move between multiple horizons, from the self-reflexive to the public, from the artistic to the everyday, passing through the ephemeral nature of the processes and the corporeality of the work. In each case there is a manifest connection between the experience of art and vital issues, either from the personal or the collective. This exhibition and the artists that comprise it is not only the beginning of Tomás Redrado Art Gallery in Miami, but also the starting point of a program that seeks to distinguish itself as a space for artistic diversity and aesthetic exchange.
March, 2022