Cuestiones Vivas

Lecuona y Hernández

13.09.2018 – 10.11.2018

This pair of artists elaborates their proposals with a performative component and an experimental character. They create their works from any discipline and plastic medium, such as installation, performance, video, sculpture or painting, to take advantage of the different aesthetic and formal possibilities that they offer them. Their work goes through a hybridation of the media, treating the problems of painting from an sculptural view and vice versa; always having a predilection for installation processes and site-specific interventions.

The exhibition Cuestiones Vivas / Living Issues is composed of three installations that try to establish a dialogue with each other, activating concepts such as identity, empire, hegemony and power. In their work they reflect aspects that conform their local identity, relative to the Canary Islands; and that for them are related to processes of resistance, surrender and acculturation. They mention the mechanisms of construction of a collective story, which has suffered different distortions, where different realities are confronted.

The exercise of conquest, evangelization and cultural imposition suffered by the Canary Islands resulted in an image in which there is always a veiled duel, a lack. For centuries, the strategic location of the archipelago has served as a bridge between America, Europe and Africa, having great importance in its story migratory movements, commercial networks, monopolies, free zones, etc. The subsequent image of exoticism and good savage to which the experiences of travelers such as Humboldt contributed, does nothing but add another layer of meaning to an identity complexity. The closest memory passes through the aftermath of a civil war and a dictatorial regime that hoards large gaps and projects a long shadow of disappeared, exiles and prisons. In the last decades, the insular landscape obeys to criteria linked to the tourism reason why the space is being reconfigured to construct a species of theatrical island, in which the decoration serves as a backdrop for a postcard.

The exhibition confronts this polyhedral and schizophrenic metaphor of an insular project confronted with other realities and other representations, which aims to understand the structures of will and power that make up the complexity of the new images with which we all live. Cuestiones Vivas / Living Issues lays the foundations for the decoding of a reality wrapped in a historical and social story that time has defined creating false concepts to which the pair sees a necessary review.