Dear friends,⁠

In these turbulent times of uncertainty, we would like to share with you a message of encouragement. ⁠This epidemic is taking a toll on all of us. The wound is deep and the scar will be very much visible. ⁠

In light of this exceptional situation, we have reflected on what we can offer you that is different than the usual. We have given carte blanche to our artists. ⁠

Our idea is that during these “unusual” days, you can enjoy “unusual” content in our space. Now, more than ever, that space is yours. We have titled this project as Intimate. ⁠If art can comfort us in this delicate moment, we are bound to give a step forward. A person who does not give up cannot be defeated.⁠

I would like to share with you this timeless quote by José Val del Omar:⁠ “He who gives more, has more: Mathematics of God.”⁠

Words are not necessary. Nowadays, there is no need for explanations. However, we encourage you to contact us if you want to know more.

Eugenio Ampudia addresses the youngest members of the household. This week they are on vacation so we propose a brief drawing class. We encourage parents and grandparents to practice with the children. You are welcome to send your results if you feel like it.

Today, we change the scenery once again. We are very interested in sending out different messages. In this occasion, Bernardí Roig is “caged” in his studio. He brings us “Exercises for enclosed times”, with the Sex Pistols as soundtrack.

Nacho Martín Silva teams up with his daughter Olivia. She represents a dance that is not exempt from danger.  The artist compels us to freely interpret it, making clear that we should keep taking steps forward.

We are all living a present that is very different from our day-to-day past. The artist starts up by showing us his confined present, getting a small glimpse of what is going on outside. He then transitions to a vertiginous sequence of photos from his phone that register his life during the past months.

A past full of connections and human interactions we are all longing for right now. A past that will be our future again.

During the mid-70s, Val del Omar voluntarily confined himself in his PLAT lab (Pictorial Luminous Audio Tactile), where he set up a small cell as his dormitory. There, he dedicated his time to create what he called “the garden of the machines”.

By using the Truca, an analogic table with visual effects invented by him, he created this piece that is astonishing still today. The sound is part of the extense sound archive compiled by Val del Omar throughout his life.

We want to end the week with a series of “exercises” by Marco Godoy in nature. A confinement very different from the usual.

The artist was surprised by this situation while in Chile, after opening an exhibition in Santiago. Once the alarm state was declared in Madrid, without flights and with everything on a halt, he retired to the Chilean countryside. This area, full of remains of indigenous ceramics, Pre-Columbian shells, and lithic tools, has allowed him to connect with other registers of time.

It is astonishing how the artist works with very few means and totally isolated.

All the images are intented to be observed with the same serenity with which the videos decelerate reality.

From the beginning of her career Almudena Lobera has been working on the window as an architectural, pictorial, historic, domestic, and virtual frame. In recent residencies, she has used the window of her studio as a starting point for her projects about perception, representation, and memory. In these times of quarantine, of contemplating life through those virtual and physical windows that separate and connect us, Almudena Lobera has created this brief piece, Still Frame, from documentary photos of what was her studio in Ghent (Belgium) in 2016 and from an empty photo album she found on the street. Alluding to the mystery of the stolen panel from the Van Eyck brothers’ Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, Almudena carried out an intervention in her studio, building an altarpiece packed with the same shapes of the windows there. Lobera creates a poetic action to capture the landscape and time. The windows were thus transformed into mystical and mysterious pictorial surfaces. Interestingly enough, the rickety album contained numerous windows/passe-partouts in a shape similar to those in the space. The story about “a missing content container” started in the intervention in space seems to be completed in the pages of that book full of vanished memories.

My sole outing during quarantine is my morning walk with my dog, Lluvia. In the empty and abandoned city, I have observed how, day by day, plants have started eating the city up. It reminds me of the pictorial tradition of romantic ruins, where nature retakes human construction. This year we have a beautiful spring, a great paradox in the context of the pandemic, the health crisis, and death looming over us these days. Nature lives with its back turned to this human tragedy, and even takes advantage of our disappearance to reclaim what has been taken from her. Every morning I enjoy watching how the plants burst out of cracks in the city, despite being a symptom of our fragile situation as a species and our pursuit for shelter to protect us.

Quarantine has caught Cristóbal and Diego, HYPER STUDIO, among several places. The week before the declaration of the state of alarm they were in Amsterdam, the day before it was declared, in Marrakech, and two weeks later they had to travel back to Tokyo. “Trapped” in Madrid, they propose a piece that allows us to connect with different parts of the world. itsalwaysrainingsomewhere.com is powered by 50 cameras that broadcast in real time, located all over the world, from Asia to America, from the bottom of the sea to space. Every 10 seconds, in a random order, the artwork connects to a camera in the front and another behind. Every instant, three places connect, a link is created, a bridge is drawn that reconnects the world with each other.

“As far as I’m concerned, colors are living beings, highly evolved individuals that integrate with us and the entire universe. Colors are the authentic inhabitants of space.”

– Yves Klein

Colombian artist Leyla Cárdenas has decided to recover a piece from 2017 for the INTIMATE Project that, due to its theme, is very relevant in the times we are living.

“Deep time is the concept of geological time. The time frame of millions of years in which scientists believe earth has existed, backed by observation of natural phenomena. I think this notion of deep time is very powerful, because it confirms that it is in the space where the value of time is stored.

The video starts with this beautiful text by Ralph Ingersoll where he paraphrases the Koran: “In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds”. Using the antipode as a geographical metaphor the camera “reads” slowly through the stratigraphy of an eroded mountain, making a parallel between a “geological construction” and a “human construction”. What you see upside down is a rammed earth wall found in a state of ruin near the outskirts of Bogotá. The second text as we go across the ground: “this world with all its details has been elaborated and annihilated, and will be elaborated and annihilated: infinitely” comes from Borges quoting Hume.”

Leyla Cárdenas

These are times for reflection, but we also need to add a little bit of sense of humor to our everyday lives.
We are sure that your weekend will be improved after watching Duane Michals’ proposals.
It is an honor to count on his submission for the Intimate Project, bearing in mind he is one of the most prestigious artists of American avante-garde.

Today we present Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s proposal.

“I resolved to abandon trade and to fix my aim on something more praiseworthy and stable; whence it was that I made preparation for going to see part of the world and its wonders.”

-Amerigo Vespucci

“Without a doubt, we are constantly witnessing the creation of new devices and applications that ease are everyday tasks. During confinement due to coronavirus, homes with children have turned into schools. In most cases, devices like phones, computers or tables are essential tools.
In the case of this video, Google’s translator allows the use of the camera for  simultaneous translation of anything that looks like a letter. The use of this tool was crucial since homework is in a language we are not fluent in. This led me and my daughters to the discovery of an infinite game: works that translate, lose their meaning, move with our hands and, depending on the material we use, can be very absurd.”

During years, Jorge Perianes has saved his sketchbooks like a treasure. A lot of sketches ended up being extraordinary artworks. Others are waiting patiently on paper for their moment to materialize.
Today, we invite you to enter his world through these selected pages. The artist selected a song by one of his favorite bands “Young Marble Giants”, which adapts perfectly to the images.
Perianes proposes this quote by Walter Benjamin to guide us through the drawings:
“The New Angel […] preferred to free men by taking from them, rather than make them happy by giving to them [anything], to understand a [notion of] humanity that proves itself by destruction.”

Jessica Stockholder has been working at home where she has made a collection of sewn, drawn, glued, folded, painted, and torn paper works, difficult to pin a single word on. We want to share them with you.

We are including two poems. The first one created by her son as a gift on Mother’s Day; the second one created by Jessica.

We want to start off the week with “Attraction” by Miler Lagos. Although it was created 15 years ago, it has lost none of its immediacy.

A “lost” balloon unleashes an unexpected encounter. What today seems harmless, could harm us tomorrow. The artist alludes to the lightness of emotions and the fragility of everything that surrounds humans.

It reminds us of a beautiful quote by José Val del Omar:
“Life is an idling explosion, and I intend to compress it until it turns into ecstasy, into an eternal instant.”

These past days, the home has been a refuge, a whole. We have rethought the home by observing the lives that surround us, rediscovering the nuances of their presence through observation and vigil.

In Spain, the alarm state has been going on for 84 days. It will be over soon.

During this lock down time in Finland I still have access to the forest. At night I have been sketching videos using a small portable projector. I get a lot of my inspiration from the forest – studying nature.

I am always looking for codes and meanings hidden in the trees and lakes.

So instead of making a artistic representation of nature I bring the art to the forest and ask the trees what they think.
The video clip is called – ‘Natural Laws’.

The second video with the face was a projection of a Sumerian funeral stone I found in the Metropolitan Art Museum last year.
I liked the idea of freeing the image into the context of the Finnish forest with no audience.

all the best,

Charles Sandison