Intimate is a project by Max Estrella Gallery, born as a reflection space for the period of time that the emergency situation lasts.

Issue 0 was published on April 3rd, 2020. Since then, the artists of the gallery have sent their creations week by week, which can be seen below, chronologically.

Intimate aims to accompany you in these different times.

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April 3rd, 2020

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.”⁠

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April 4th, 2020

Aitor Ortiz

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

Beyond the documentary photography of architecture and industry, and asserting the dilution factor and transmutation of reality that is associated with the photographic representation, Aitor Ortiz works with space, architecture and object as starting elements to a number of visual and cognitive unknowns.

More about Aitor Ortiz
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April 6th, 2020
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Eugenio Ampudia

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.

Featuring an extensive record of exhibitions frequently in international settings, Eugenio Ampudia’s work analyzes –always from critical positions and through iconoclastic approaches- the historic relationship between art and political power, between public space and control.

More about Eugenio Ampudia
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April 8th, 2020
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Bernardí Roig

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.

Bernardí Roig’s artistic practice explores a society trapped in an era characterized by the lack of historic memory and identity. Through painting, installation, video art, filmic appropriation, or even the essay form (as seen in his compilation of «monologues» in the book Binissalem) he focuses on conflicts that develop due to absence of communication among each other. In a world taken by mass media, Roig’s individuals have lost the ability to distinguish between truth and fiction, as well as the meaningful and the trivial.

More about Bernardí Roig
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April 13th, 2020

Nacho Martín Silva

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.

From concerns linked to notions such as the fragmentary, simulation and representation or likeliness and using the History of Art, that of humankind and the creative process itself as axes, Nacho Martín Silva’s painting could be classified as haulage and reconsideration.

More about Nacho Martín Silva
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April 17th, 2020

Markus Linnenbrink

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.

In his extremly colorful works, there is always a slow game of superimposed layers. they remind us of everything from natures wonder to human made things inspiring our senses . Every layer is a moment in time, a way to interpret and reflect existence.

In order for our future to happen, we must live the present, remember the past and create different versions of our utopias over and over again.

More about Markus Linnenbrink
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April 20th, 2020

Val del Omar

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.

With an extraordinary artistic and technological talent, Val del Omar was a ”believer in cinema” inspired by new horizons that he formulated in the term PLAT – representing the totalizing concept of a ”Picto-Luminic-Audio-Tactile” art – apart from being a contemporary and a comrade of Lorca, Cernuda, Renau, Zambrano and other figures of a Silver Age of the Spanish culture, interrupted by the Civil War.

More about Val del Omar
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April 24th, 2020
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Marco Godoy

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.

Marco Godoy’s practice consists of a set of strategies with which to throw light on and work with dissent. The exhibition space is viewed as a place associated with specific moments from our social and political context related with issues concerning our past and our present. After leveraging these situations, he draws up proposals that can serve as some kind of response.
More about Marco Godoy
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April 27th, 2020

Almudena Lobera

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.

Almudena Lobera has been devoted in recent years to showing alternative models for the configuration of the visible, delving deeply into the notion that the image is not always visible or accessible in nature. She explores the nature of the image, its varying layers, the perception of the (un)represented, the questioning of the ‘work of art’ as device and the relationship of the work with the space and with the beholder.

More about Almudena Lobera
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April 30th, 2020

Daniel Canogar

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.

Daniel Canogar started with photography, but soon embarked on a search for possible alterations of traditional formats, which took him to a rather sculptural form. Over time, Canogar’s installations increased in dimension and complexity, especially since the incorporation of optical fiber.

More about Daniel Canogar
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May 4th, 2020

HYPER STUDIO

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.

 

HYPER STUDIO is an artistic duo made up by Cristóbal Baños and Diego Iglesias. Their practice investigates the relationship between individuals and their technological environments, through their movement of a cursor in a screen or their bodies in a space, thus creating interactive experiences that link the physical and the virtual worlds.

 

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May 6th, 2020

La Ribot

“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

La Ribot is usually introduced as a dancer, choreographer, director and live artist – but even that capacious labeling feels a bit restricted. She is a radically trans-disciplinary artist, her projects starting out from movement, the body and her origins in dance, and then adopting whatever practices, systems or materials her concept prompts.

 

More about La Ribot
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May 11th, 2020

Leyla Cárdenas

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

Venturing on understanding the passing of time, searching for a way to make its fragmentation and concurrence visible, is the impulse that has driven Leyla Cárdenas from the beginning of her artistic career. Her works answer to physical space, to the place, taking in consideration architecture and the context of its vicinity, and at the same time generating various levels of meaning. Among her interests lies the analysis of palimpsestic texture of the urban space; the mere city, understood as node of times, spaces, interpretations, histories and memories.

More about Leyla Cárdenas
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May 14th, 2020
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Duane Michals

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.

Duane Michals was born in 1932 in McKeesport, PA.

Without formal photographic training, Michals broke new ground in an era dominated by documentary photo-journalism. Early on, Michals also began to incorporate text into his sequences and single images.  Far from a pedantic interpretation of his own work, these captions either told stories or posed questions in such as way as to expand the scope of the picture.  Throughout his career, Michals has used these deceptively simple methods to contemplate with child-like fascination subjects as universal as love, loss, innocence and immortality.

More about Duane Michals
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May 19th, 2020

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

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

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is considered as one of the most relevant electronic artists of our time. He develops interactive installations that are at the intersection of architecture and performance art, characterized by the mediation between his spectators’ bodies and technological devices. More than mediation, he seeks to raise a certain degree of need between both parts to achieve the interpretation exercise of the work.

More about Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
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May 22nd, 2020

Hisae Ikenaga

“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.”

Hisae Ikenaga works with everyday objects. She alters them to provide alternative meanings and uses. In her series she tackles different issues, that is, she confronts industrial versus craftsmanship, she humanizes objects, she utilizes global objects –  objects that are purchased in multinational chain stores. She manipulates and assembles their parts in different ways to create new opinions about everyday-life circumstances -, and finally poses potential genetic anomalies in mass-produced objects. In “Football pitch metric system”, she measures different spaces in relation to other spaces or things. The references used have nothing to do with the established decimal metric system. In “Multifunctional” she transforms pieces of furniture by adding parts of other pieces of furniture, resulting in multi-purposed objects. Lately she has worked on pieces that reproduce the production of tubular metal furniture. This body of work reflects on the border between design and art as an everyday object. Irony and absurdity consistently play a key role in her work.

More about Hisae Ikenaga
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May 25th, 2020

Jorge Perianes

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.”

We see with our brain, not our eyes. This is why it is important to analyze the bases our brain uses to build and invent elements, the motors and the how and why of its interpretation of reality.  These questions, distinctive of science, are addressed by Perianes from his artistic practice searching for a possible edification and a positive discourse, where he combines classical and poetic ways and –apparently- distant symbols in order to seek new meanings or outlets to the world.
More about Jorge Perianes
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May 29th, 2020

Jessica Stockholder

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.

Jessica Stockholder’s often sprawling constructions have played a crucial role in expanding the dialogue between sculpture and painting. The artist merges seemingly disparate, everyday objects, such as – lampposts, car parts, hoses, containers, extension cords, lumber, car parts, carpets and furniture. Drawing attention to these ordinary everyday materials Stockholder engages the sensuality and pleasure evoked by color and formal order in an effort to call attention to the edges of understanding. Her use of color is also pivotal as she orchestrates an intersection of pictorial and physical space and probes how meaning derives from physicality. Stockholder maps out a constructed world informed by numerous artistic traditions, including abstract expressionism, color field painting, installation art, and minimalism.

More about Jessica Stockholder
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June 2nd, 2020

Miler Lagos

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.”

Miler Lagos’ practice has as starting points dialogue and experimentation with materials, which manifest as catalyst for the central issues of his discourse.
He reflects on the relationship between images and objects, content and container. Wood and paper have served as mediums for representing his interest in the intersection of nature and culture. There is a profound concern with studying the way human beings have modeled their space or has been modeled by environmental and geographic conditions. Moreover, there is an intention of raising awareness about conservation of the environment and how we gradually turn nature into a resource to inhabit, into raw material, into merely a vehicle.
More about Miler Lagos
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June 7th, 2020

Inma Femenía

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.

Femenía’s artistic practice explores the relationship between matter and visual perception, and shows her connection to the digital world. She brings together the virtual and real world, proving her interest in language and imagery constructed through screens.
Inma Femenía holds a BA in Fine Arts and an MA in Arts Production from the Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain. She received various awards during her studies. In 2013, she moved to Berlin in order to continue her research and start exploring the relationship between art and industry. Two years later she returned to Valencia.
More about Inma Femenía
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June 12th, 2020
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Charles Sandison

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

 

Charles Sandison (born UK 1969) lives and works in Tampere, Finland.

Originally from Scotland, Sandison studied at the Glasgow School of Art. After graduating in 1991 he exhibited and was associated with the Young British Artist movement. However, in 1995 Sandison moved to Finland seeing it as a more suitable place to develop his art. Sandison is a pioneering artist in his extensive work with computer generative art and artificial life. His data projections combine language, form, architecture, and movement.

More about Charles Sandison

Intimate is a project by Max Estrella Gallery, as a reflection during confinement due to Covid-19. If you would like to receive the latest editions of Intimate in your email, please subscribe to our Newsletter.

Participating artists (in order of appearance): Aitor Ortiz, Eugenio Ampudia, Bernardí Roig, Nacho Martín Silva, Markus Linnenbrink, Val del Omar, Marco Godoy, Almudena Lobera, Daniel Canogar, Leyla Cárdenas, La Ribot, Hyper Studio, and …

If you would like more information about the project, the artists, or the gallery, please contact us at info@maxestrella.com

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©2020 Galería Max Estrella

Design and development: HYPER STUDIO