print December 2014

Francisco Ruiz de Infante

Francisco Ruiz de Infante is among the best Spanish artists working with moving images. As a teenager in the mid- to late 1980s, he was already making Super 8 films that evidenced his inclination for textured images, which he created with exquisite and striking attention to detail. While Ruiz de Infante’s connection to moving images has been steadfast, he moved to Paris in 1991 to study with Christian Boltanski. Since then, a sense of the theatrical and a deep feeling for material have entered his work.

For two decades, his production has brought together what he calls “clean images”—meaning

print Summer 2014

Bleda and Rosa

Some twenty years ago, artists María Bleda and José María Rosa first earned public recognition for a very simple and evocative series of photographs titled “Campos de fútbol” (Soccer Fields), 1992. For all the images in this series, the pair used a similar compositional strategy to show empty spaces rich in associations. Their practice has remained fundamentally the same ever since: serial works, images of spaces seen from a distance, a certain neutrality, a primary focus on landscape. Drawing inspiration from the Bechers, Bleda and Rosa focus on the evocative power of any place that has a unique

print March 2014

El Roto

Though almost a stranger to the art world, El Roto is one of the best-known draftsmen in Spain. For more than forty years, he has contributed to a number of publications, among them El País, the country’s leading newspaper, for which he publishes illustrations on a daily basis. On the art scene—in which his participation is recent and sporadic—he signs his paintings with his real name: Andrés Rábago.

El Roto is not the only pseudonym Rábago has assumed. As early as the 1970s, he used the name OPS to sign drawings with a Surrealist iconography and spirit that delighted readers of the

print September 2013

Paz Errázuriz

The exhibition “Cuerpos” (Bodies) brought together two series of Paz Errázuriz’s photographs—“Tango,” 1986, and “Cuerpos,” 2002—with a nine-minute video piece, El sacrificio, 1989–2001, the only work she has produced in that medium thus far. The Chilean artist early in the 1980s and ’90s focused on portraits of people on the margins of society (the insane, the homeless, transvestite prostitutes, boxers, circus people, and so on), and these origins have continued to influence her even as her practice has evolved to encompass subjects more fully integrated into society. “Tango,” for

print May 2013

Wilfredo Prieto

Wilfredo Prieto is mostly known for his sculptures, installations, and performances, but, like most other artists, he has also produced a good many drawings over the course of his career, many of them related to his better-known work. Although his drawings have occasionally been included in his exhibitions, “Café hecho por Di” (A Coffee Made by Di) was the first to focus on them entirely. This show included 150 small untitled drawings (some of them dating as far back as the Cuban artist’s student years, others quite recent) and a single vast one, some thirty feet long. What stands out more than

print February 2013

Patricia Gadea

Patricia Gadea died in 2006 at the age of forty-six. Though she was fairly well known in the 1980s and early ’90s, her late work has been seen only occasionally—owing, perhaps, to changes in the style of her work and her decision to distance herself from the art world by moving to Palencia, a small city in the north of Spain where she supported herself by giving art lessons to children and caring for the elderly. Her recent exhibition in Madrid, “Patricia’s War,” was the first in six years. Though not a large show, it encompassed more than twenty years of production, from 1984 until her

print January 2013

Luis Úrculo

“Ensayo sobre la ruina” (Essay on the Ruin) is the title that encompasses a number of proposals created by Luis Úrculo to address a simple problem, one that is unfortunately more timely than it may seem: the relationship between a ruin and the order that precedes it. Though the foundations of Úrculo’s thinking are in architecture—indeed, he has a degree in that field and it continues to visually and conceptually bind together his multiple endeavors—he makes use of all possible visual media (drawing, photography, video, sculpture, and more) in his work. For example, the drawings Colapso

picks August 03, 2012

Gabriele Basilico

In this exhibition, twenty-four of 350 photographs by Gabriele Basilico are exhibited alongside Piranesi etchings of the same sites. The result is a rigorous documentation that formulates a comparative cartography of Rome in the eighteenth and then twenty-first centuries. The differences lie in the details, as comparisons between the respective renditions suggest that the sites have hardly changed over the centuries: A side building might have been added or a set of lush trees grown on the lungotevere. Nevertheless, Basilico sets out to oppose his images to those of Piranesi, as if to allow the

print February 2012

Angus Collis

It is becoming less and less common for galleries to show the work of younger artists who entirely and unapologetically focus on painting. Perhaps it’s that fewer and fewer young artists paint without pursuing some other rhetorical agenda; instead, they attempt to endow the act of painting with metalinguistic meaning or, though engaged in painting, simultaneously deny it as a medium. And, of course, there is an abundance of young artists with an indirect relationship to painting—for instance, artists who draw, sometimes in color. An artist from New Zealand who now lives in Spain, Angus

print January 2012

Antonio Ballester Moreno

The question of the relationship between children’s art and that of adults has long interested Antonio Ballester Moreno. At a previous exhibition here, titled “No Future,” he showed drawings he himself had made as a child. The background to “No School,” his most recent show, was a workshop that Ballester Moreno gave, in which participants attempted to do away with learned technique and acquired sophistication in order to make something much simpler, something more akin to the art of children.

“No School” featured the pieces made by participants in the workshop along with a single sculpture. Just

print October 2011

Vanessa Winship

As simple as it was efficacious, August Sander’s approach to photography in his encyclopedic series “People of the 20th Century” is a model whose influence continues to be felt. It is not hard to detect its impact on the British photographer Vanessa Winship’s series “Sweet Nothings: Rural Schoolgirls from the Borderlands of Eastern Anatolia,” 2008, which was published as a book in 2009. Like Sander’s work, Winship’s portraits take a frontal approach and maintain a uniform distance from the subject; the human figure is presented straightforwardly and within his or her everyday environment. Thus,

print May 2011

Alejandra Roux

The work of Alejandra Roux, an Argentine artist who has lived in Madrid for twenty years, makes clear her ongoing belief in the narrative and emotional potential of painting. Based on the story by the Brothers Grimm, her recent exhibition “Hänsel & Gretel” evoked the sexually charged fear and violence that, as Bruno Bettelheim ascertained long ago, underlie many childhood stories. Phallic and vaginal metaphors abound, and eroticism is one of the unequivocal drives in this work; it is felt in objects not usually associated with the erotic (like the stole around the neck of the lady in La madrastra

Pablo Llorca