Crit #26, @Goldsmiths College, 24 April 2012
Presenting artists:
Goldsmiths, Year 2
Currently my artistic focus is on industry and the role it plays in our ‘glocal’ world, as well as the tensions between the industrial and the artist as a worker.
Graduate, Brighton University, Fine Art Degree, Painting
mercedesgil.com [email protected]
The works exhibited are informed by the experiences of growing up in my home country, Spain. They are dreamlike imagery that I have been developing within the arena of my visual language, which is highly intuitive and rather unconscious. I have set out to create different and complex narratives and other realities within the paintings, telling stories within stories; revealing when at the same time concealing them.
Though my work offer a personal take on the world, I aim to refer to the past but without being nostalgic. I propose the viewer to tap into his or her own readings and imagination, evoke thoughts, memories. I aimed to achieve this by using different scales within the painting to make reference to different times and places.
Chelsea, 1yr MA Fine Art
www.maartenvandenbos.nl [email protected]
‘In his works paint sometimes resembles skin or flesh or old gore, organ meats – it always emphasizes substance, more than gesture. Nevertheless, the painterly gesture is always there. His paintings balance and swing between the depicted (parts of the) human body, and bodily characteristics of paint. The presence of the body, and what it is that brings life into it, commutes between the image and the matter from which it emerges.’
I am preoccupied with the (human) body, especially the head. During my MA I am researching different ways of displaying how I perceive the body and how I approach the process of making an art object. I am interested in a way of working that’s intuitive and can embrace different areas of interests at once without fixing my work in a specific style or (technical) process. Constant elements in my approach to making is intuition, working with ‘gestural materials’ and using found imagery.
Fascinated by where the photograph meets the poem, I take the simplest approach to concentrating the eye, working to unclothe the supposed known. Rejecting specialisation and narrow fields of enquiry my subjects are memory and the city and the camera is my imperfect mirror on them, exploring the mystery of resonance, interrogating the passing for the enduring, searching for human stains, informed by surrealism, arte povera, and the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, an aesthetic centred on the acceptance of impermanence. For me, the photograph is a beginning rather than an end and I do not hesitate to translate and combine my images into and with other media