Isabel Croxatto Galería in collaboration with Galería Nueva Madrid, presents two solo exhibitions: La Tierra Prometida (The Promised Land) by the established Chilean artist Coco González Lohse, and Ensamblajes Territoriales by Johans Peñaloza, open to the public from June 3 to 30, in Calle Doctor Fourquet 10, Madrid.
The exhibition La Tierra Prometida is composed of 22 small format paintings, which through the artist's characteristic irony, present natural sceneries inhabited by big words and small characters. These figures exist in this promised land that is far from paradise: the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, the sinking of the Titanic or global warming appear veiled in these paintings, mixed with small personal dramas of individuals lost in nature and the landscape.
Daniel Silvo, director of Galería Nueva accurately describes the scenarios of "The Promised Land": "The desolation faced by these characters with which we can identify ourselves refers us to European romantic painting, and to those scenarios of sublime nature in which the protagonists are presented in front of the immensity".
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THE PROMISED LAND
The earth when it flows | Text by Guillermo GrebeCoco Gonzalez is a unique observer, metric, subtle, sensitive, devourer of sinuous corners and nooks that say nothing apparent but that when touched by his restless eye take on a new life as if taking away the faintness of memory.
- Guillermo Grebe"Leave your native land and your father's house, and go to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and curse him that curses you, and by you all the peoples of the earth shall be blessed."
- Genesis 12:1-3.Thus spoke Yahweh to his descendants; the promised land had not only a configuration of physical limitations (the Negev and along the coast of the sea, the land of the Canaanites and Lebanon) but it was also part of an idealization of the freedom of an entire persecuted people, the burden of an inheritance of hope to the Jewish people in Pharaonic times, subjected to pain and death.
There is no hope without an offspring that can till the land again, grow, be, exist.
Something is hidden in the Promised Land of Coco Gonzalez Lohse. Something that literally sustains the landscape as a divine word also included as a protagonist immersed in the environment.
The Promised Land is a new installment of these observations that oscillate between the minimalism of the object (they are paintings of 15 x 20 cms) and the spatial magnitude of what is painted, that is to say the landscape in its holistic dimension is trapped before the eye of the spectator opening the field to the necessary perplexity of the violated territory that is Chile, the country with the broken corners overlooking the sea or that permanent and fatal ledge from where we all hang.
Coco Gonzalez is a unique observer, metric, subtle, sensitive, devourer of sinuous corners and nooks that say nothing apparent but that when touched by his restless eye take on a new life as if taking away the faintness of memory.
He searches for pieces forgotten in time and rusty toys that are like the match heads of Los Andes or the marks left by the POP of the 80s of which he is a loyal and worthy representative, a depository of what was left unsaid or what was said to the point of exhaustion in those years and those to come.
There is a sound of silence in Coco's work, something that makes us enter our own tunnels, dark as metaphors of our distributed territories that are far away from what we see.
That silence of the southern ice fields or the desert-desert, the fearsome Patagonian winds or those that are whistling strong between the Andes, the endless giant tides of the Strait of Magellan, or the buildings that are like black holes located in our small incomprehensible cities and full of common sense.
If there is something that crosses the painting of many painters of Coco's generation is the darkness, that black bitumen with viridian, carmine and prussian blue that squeezes or floods the form that tries to be liberated. This point is not random, nor is it a minor detail; just as the French romantic painters of the late eighteenth century, the humidity, the fog, the darkness that reigned put a tension of unexpected human shame in each work, in the case of many of the Chilean painters of the 80s, it is also a way of succumbing to the emptiness or the recognition of existence, perhaps with that necessary quota of epic and precarious romanticism at the same time.
In this new work by Coco, all of that comes to us again with a remarkable tension and a high poetic concentration of a silence that seeks to shout from those corners that few see or inhabit. There is something that is hidden in our history, that is unveiled here, from the dark invisible of that southern-realism of the south of the world, something that becomes more complex with the words that appear there: Ethics, Virus, Race, Grief, Oblivion, Caduco, Doubt. What are those words? What is? What is missing? What subjugates, what liberates?
What are words if not rifles in the temples of automatons and even more, what are those words in the drifts of our empty territories of crowds that are only alive because they are virgins of ourselves?
Here the Promised Land that Coco González Lohse proposes to us to acquire the magnitude that transcends the momentum that comes to us in small format as tears or as covers of a small book where our lives are written, the past, the present, the ones to come.
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The absurd, the contradiction and the oniric are amalgamated in the search for a plastic language, hand in hand with social criticism and humor.
- Coco González Lohse
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Although they are landscapes or memories of my travels throughout Chile, it is uncertain whether they are real, imagined or dreamed. They have the light of a timeless time, frozen in its own instant, that questions us about what we will do with and on our planet, and life with us.
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We are part of a world that we have populated with images and words, where dreams, hopes and projects have been in constant crisis and change. I am looking for an austere, small, travel painting, as if to remember what must be remembered.
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Neo, 2021
Oil on canvas board, 20 x 15 cm -
THE PROBLEM THAT INITIATES MY WORK IS THAT OF THE INDIVIDUAL.
From the words we create in our countries and from an innumerable amount of old objects bought in the most diverse places, I have generated a bank of images, gathered in a very visceral way, as if they were the product of an archaic and basic Photoshop.
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Artist's Studio | 2021