STATEMENTS

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UNTITLED SPACES

 

At the beginning, Untitled Spaces Project departs of visual experiments that come from real and fictitious structures of exhibition spaces, galleries and museums. These works seek to investigate in different ways the interrelation between the artistic object, represented as an organic pictorial presence, and the artistic institution that contains it, expressed visually as its architectural structure. The contextual space becomes the main theme of this work, looking to question the of validation problem in the current system of contemporary art.

 

This process begins inside the room through painting and then extends into space, resemantizing construction materials to talk about the wall that becomes the artwork. But then it takes a broader dimension when leaving the exhibition space. Now the work determines new unconventional spaces that contain it, where the piece is taken to the other side of its initial role, to transform the new alternative placement in part of this interaction and to come back to be exhibited as a photograph of this action.

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GLITCHED SPACES

 

The current artwork of Guillermo García Cruz introduces the concept of Glitch to his institutional investigation. Glitch is a term that comes from computer science and refers to a temporary error that is corrected in some moments. In contrast to the bugs, the glitch doesn’t destroy the system, instead, it is temporarily twisted. This temporary twist is assimilated to the global crisis we are experiencing in different ways, an event comparable to the changes of paradigm created by Berlin's Wall Fall, or the World Wars, being the first time that such a big globalized event hits the millennial generation. 

This “failure” affects all aspects of this new way of acting and behaving, and obviously the field of art does not escape this. That is why it is important to ask certain questions about the weight and influence of the institution or structure as a container and validator of what happens in this field, in such a particular context. This investigation has many layers, but in the first place this displacement is metalinguistic, referring to a global disruption that is related to the functioning of the art institution. 

The virtual fairs, the 3D tours, the long distance exhibitions, the NFTs, have come to stay?, Or are they part of this glitch that will come back when the “error is corrected in the system”? Actually, we have no idea of how this will affect the way we understand art, to the spaces or to the walls that traditionally validate what is art and what is not, but definitely we know we have been living in the middle of an earthquake. 

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Extended Statement and investigation interests

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My current body of work seeks to question what happens in a variety of fields during this moment of change, when we all feel a little bit disoriented, anxious or curious about what is about to occur. I have been working for several years specifically about the importance of art institutions versus personal expression. So since last year it was impossible to avoid what was happening everywhere outside the studio, even at a personal level. In 2020 I was preparing my most important exhibition at Lima, and suddenly strong restrictions were declared, so I had to cancel it and be rescued by a military airplane sended by the Uruguayan government, because every airport was closed from one day to another in Peru.

This particular experience and the rest of facts we all know made me start seeking a way to express this state of mind into my painting. And made me investigate more about the basis of geometric painting in Latin America. That's why I started to introduce this ¨glitch¨concept, I wanted to find the most minimal way of talking about all these things, without being literal. 

All this investigation got stronger when I went deeper in my roots as an uruguayan artist and discovered the importance of the MADI movement in modern art. They discovered that painting should not necessarily be conditioned by the rectangular canvas, on the contrary,  the canvas shape should follow the structure of the painting. With these two facts I found the need to work harder and deeper investigating about how a minimal change can affect the whole structure, working from the pictorial and sculptural field.