Hartmon’s “Twist Every Idea” project is back

This past sprind we started the Hartmon project to connect emerging art with public affairs. To harmonize disorder, from a different perspective.

For the second edition, we are once again inspired by our manifesto. Because we believe in creating. And we twist each idea until it achieves the best version of itself. Creativity is our differentiating element, and that is why we take great care of it and dedicate (a lot of) time and (a lot of) space to it.

Once again, curators Javier Aparicio and Victoria Solano have filled Harmon with small, wonderful works for the exhibition “Twisting Every Idea,” a project that primarily uses canvas as its medium and painting as its discipline, aiming to demonstrate that, although the form is the same, the narratives never are.

“Artists spend most of their time and lives finding the best version of a language. In this project, we present artists who are now developing their practice from a place of genuine search, not wanting to find solutions, but elaborating questions that concatenate one after another,” explains Aparicio, director of the El Chico gallery.

Hartmon is a collaborative proposal that aims to serve as a spotlight for emerging artists and generate impact. And it aims to build bridges between art, reflection, and the public agenda.

We thank the artists who have joined Hartmon and the galleries Belmonte, Pradiauto, The Goma, and El Chico.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Alejandro Villa-Durán (Jalisco, Mexico, 1993). The starting point of his pictorial and sculptural work is “intuitive choreography,” a term that condenses a methodological repetition: going out, returning, and then tracing the route. Generally, these journeys outside the city seek to turn the body into a medium for attentive presence of the environment. It is not about interpreting the natural, but about establishing a unique relationship that allows the body to generate a differential when affected by the encounter: that is, by the unpredictable. The sensation opens up, and perception responds not by precipitating signs but by establishing a line of interpretation, a position—with the view of being shared—about what has been experienced.

Elisa Pardo Puch (Madrid, 1988). Her work reflects on the logics of consumption and objects of desire through elements and forms extracted from personal experiences, emotions, and everyday situations. Her work often links autobiographical elements with the present (historical and social) and with the space that contains the pieces. The artist works with techniques that allow her to proceed intuitively, repetitively, and meticulously—such as drawing or sewing—and uses the tension produced between industrial elements and artisanal procedures. Through different formats, she explores the potential of disposable and poor materials to think and create from their own connotations, inverting or deactivating certain automatic associations between the material, its use, and its desirability.

Karolina Dworska (Rzeszów, Poland, 1997). An artist based in London. In 2021, she was selected for the New Contemporaries Award, the UK’s leading support network for emerging artistic practices. Her work explores, through a variety of sculptural and textile media, the grey area between dream and reality, fantastic spaces, and uses imagined environments with unreal characters as a backdrop for her work. Additionally, her work also explores her immigrant past, as she emigrated to the UK as a child from Bieszczady, Poland. She works through an interdisciplinary practice focused on dreamlike landscapes, where things are undefined and uncomfortable.

Nada Bien is the artistic project of Ramón Duero Orlando (Madrid, 1992). A graduate in audiovisual communication and a self-taught painter and tattoo artist. Nada Bien provides space for a series of creative concerns—”It is a concept that guides the practice. Something like a polysemic mantra, which helps to focus action and thought. To be able to advance in experimentation and in the excitement of sharing experiences and ways of seeing.” His technique can be characterized as mixed: hectographic ink, paper on canvas, acrylic spray, graphite. A very beautiful aspect of his work is that he intervenes on the canvas from both sides, creating an agency on the reverse. The shapes painted on the back are hinted at from the front, emphasized or hidden also depending on the light.

Lucía Bayón (Madrid, 1994). Focuses her practice around sculpture and writing. To address the problem of continuity versus discontinuity and bordering on notions of flow and fold, Bayón conceives the different elements that build the practice as rhetorical devices within a semantic field of circulation, in order to explore the potential space of translation between language (action, mold), and matter (malleable element, mutable content). The sculptural production is articulated from the minor, the residual excess, and the codified. Combining practices of conservation and preservation, artisanal traditions, and gradually incorporating industrial processing techniques, the work addresses the functioning of certain specific production methods and the conditions in which this work is produced. The insistence on the repetition and accumulation of gestures, rhythms, and recurring motifs culminates in the perception of a moment of overlapping content. This points to the idea of sustaining a circuit that entangles movements of circularity, deconstruction processes, and entangles the residual in a slow becoming, so the practice adopts a sensitivity to remain speculative.

Martin Llavaneras (Lleida, 1983) lives and works in Barcelona. His practice revolves around sculpture and installation, exploring the various forms of circulation of raw materials. Llavaneras uses substances that traverse and sediment bodies, objects, and words, while examining the cycles through which their meaning accumulates, distributes, and oxidizes. He studied Fine Arts at UPV (Bilbao, Spain), HTW (Berlin, Germany), and UB (Barcelona, Spain). Among his main solo exhibitions are Cau (Pols, Valencia, 2020); Turbaturbo (La Capella, Barcelona, 2019); Fruit Belt (Espai 13 – Joan Miró Foundation, Barcelona, 2017); Humus Recalls Curvatures (La Panera Art Center, Lleida, 2017); and Reengineering Calcium (Blueproject Foundation, Barcelona, 2016).

Miguel Marina (Madrid, 1989) holds a degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid. He understands his work as a process in which each piece and each material leads to the next, causing formal and discursive jumps that seek to analyze and think about the landscape and the different elements that compose it from painting and the various plastic ways it offers. In his practice, he uses processes that involve the union of idea-image-material and believes that these extend to form a body of works that look at different fronts but refer to the same thing, a kind of fragmented narrative that evokes doing and the manual as consciousness and a starting point when relating to his work on a daily basis.

Abel García (Seville, 1996) finds in the adolescent universe a starting point from which to generate a narrative in poetic fiction. His proposal aims to identify the psychological dimension of youth identity development beyond the creation of a simple idealized portrait. Therefore, the emotional or intimate is used as sediment to address issues related to the adolescent’s path bent towards the direction marked by adult society. Young people sense a feeling of denial towards their autonomy, being deprived of an object as essential as their own desire and its random, plural, and integrative nature. Adolescence and the passage of time, the denial of the loss of innocence, link his work to that of Guillermo Martín Bermejo, who considers Abel part of what he defines as the New Spanish Figuration. The different mediums of both artists provide a broad spectrum of adult psychology looking at the adolescent as an object of desire and loss.

Álvaro García (Madrid, 1997) graduated in Fine Arts in 2019 from the Complutense University of Madrid. He is an artist who explores the limits of a personal but recognizable universe for the rest, using painting in a way that recalls classical schools. His language revolves around the mystical and supernatural that arises from dreams. His painting technique demonstrates his mastery of the human body and its forms. In his paintings, we can appreciate a kind of symbiosis between the Renaissance and Surrealism. Álvaro is the second artist to participate in Adentro/Afuera with a solo exhibition at El Chico.

Álvaro Chior (A Coruña, 1992). His work, which combines disciplines such as sculpture, sound, writing, and film, focuses on language and image, the gesturality implicit in their articulations, their material qualities, their relationships with bodily and physical processes, and the quest for desingularization of their units through processes like repetition or movement. His work has been exhibited in institutions such as the Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum (Madrid), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Sala de arte joven (Madrid), Sala Amadís Injuve (Madrid), Matadero (Madrid), CC Can Felipa (Barcelona), Fabra i Coats (Barcelona), DA2 Domus Artium 2002 (Salamanca), Las Cigarreras (Alicante), TEA Tenerife Space of the Arts (Tenerife), Etopia: Center of Art and Technology (Zaragoza), as well as in other countries like the USA, Mexico, Italy, and Scotland.

Jose Casas (Blanes, 1995). Graduated in Fine Arts in 2021 from the University of Granada and holds a master’s in Interdisciplinary Artistic Production from the University of Malaga. Artistically, from pre-adolescence and on his own, he began with “lifesaving” writing, later delving into the adolescent world of rap while studying photography, recording two solo works and with a group. Thus, his earliest artistic interferences were some concerts in bars and pubs in the city of Granada. These early works, though now distant, risk being mentioned not as pertinent but as witnesses to an initial artistic encounter that would end up being an indicator that this “cathartic-lyrical image” feeling comes from before “artistic” training and has matured, pouring into the paintings and drawings that have become his main production core.

Marina Roca Díe (Madrid, 1988). Whether through thick oil strokes, firmly fixing the figure of a body on the canvas, or in flimsy pencil outlines of a sexual relationship, what is essential in Marina’s work is the constant exploration and scrutiny of that thing we call the body. A body, the body, our bodies—a phenomenon so fundamental and basic in our lives but, in its own flesh, so imperceptible. We live through it, in it, and sometimes against it. We cannot live without it. It is a paradox of perception: I am not my body, and I do not exist without it. It is a container that holds everything I am, and yet, that self incessantly overflows the boundaries that enclose it. Through representations from various branches like philosophy, psychoanalysis, and feminism, Marina extensively explores the perplexing territory of the body, its interior, its exterior, its forms, textures, and content to create a powerful representation. Ultimately, what all these images and representations capture is that a body is never just a body.

Silvia Olabarría (Vizcaya, 1974). Silvia understands painting as an exercise where signs, signals, stains, and marks confront each other, seeking a plastic result that generates a deep aesthetic emotion, a place and time to be while looking at a painting. Apparently contradictory according to the tradition that states the figurative is the opposite of abstraction, the elements that make up her works sometimes have characteristics of both. Her works involve the mechanized and industrial, as well as the organic; improvised strokes intermingle with the imagined and controlled. Recently, she has strengthened a personal language around the process, using techniques and tools to expand it, making it the main character of the painting, making it visible. Lately, she is interested in voids, fragments, and what is covered and makes it impossible to see the entire image field; when she uses templates, she makes interruption an essential element.

Blanca Guerrero (Madrid, 1990). Her work encompasses painting, photography, and collage. With each of these mediums, she proposes places to be. Her process starts from exercises of conscious observation; from surrendering the self to the landscape, to the moment, or to the environment. When producing her work, she moves across these transient instances and tries to recover that visual and bodily awareness. With her work, Guerrero prolongs the sensory nature of fleeting phenomena, such as the sun’s glow, a nighttime landscape, the different levels of darkness during twilight, the veil of fog, or the light dancing on the water’s surface and its reflection in the depths. It is a process in which she constantly strives to give physical presence to a tenuous perception; an effort to capture the ephemeral experience of seeing.

Eloy Arribas (Valladolid, 1991). Holds a degree in Fine Arts from Salamanca. His work does not aim to verbalize but to illustrate. Illustrate that series of ideas difficult to express that, due to their emotional nature, can only be fully grasped sensibly: success, hatred, rage, envy, jealousy, love, failure, sexuality, death, passion, joy; the party, the fight, music concerts, couple relationships, destructive behavior. He intends to allude to their content, forget the name, to plastically reconstruct their body and suggest possible nominal formulations that manifest in the viewer’s mind in a hidden and subliminal way. He seeks to construct tangible realities, scenographies, through the destruction of the linguistic concepts that serve as a reference.

Jesús Crespo (Madrid, 1989). Creates paintings that explore the dynamic relationships between metamorphosis, dissolution, and extrapolation of images. In his paintings, he combines multiple perspectives to create new and ambiguous spaces where perception and discovery merge through fun. The result is a body of work that pushes the boundaries of painting and opens new possibilities for understanding the image and the random meaning of abstraction, using concepts like pareidolia. That is why Crespo’s paintings often play with ambiguity, inviting viewers to interact with his work on multiple levels to decide for themselves. Through his use of color, form, and lubricated canvases, he creates an immersive experience that blurs the lines between abstraction and figuration.

Nacho Martín Encinas (Madrid, 1984). Through the union between manual impulse and sensory consciousness, his artistic proposal revolves around the performativity of the presence and senses, as well as the idea of utility or the idea of necessity and faith in artistic practices. To this end, his way of working starts from material experimentation: being in contact, having a sensory experience with the material is a way of producing thought that derives from the process of making concrete things. This process materializes through a spatial exercise that combines the pictorial, the sensory, and the narrative.

Leopoldo Mata (Badajoz, 1994) After completing his degree in Fine Arts in Cuenca, he spent several years in Paris where he developed as a tattoo artist. Upon returning to Spain, he studied the Landa del espacio master’s program at Espositivo, during which he resumed his artistic practice as a painter up to the present. “If there is a pattern with which I feel comfortable to approach my work, it is the juxtaposition of different visual languages as a consequence of abandoning halfway executed ideas that are often overlapped with other ideas/systems, evoking dispersion and the inability to grasp any truth. I am interested in building from the noise and continuous interruption that characterizes our present, including it in the pictorial process; playing with concepts seriously for a while to later tear them down with a sensation, generating a miscellany that speaks of my way of understanding the contemporary world.”

ABOUT THE PROGRAM CURATORS

Javier Aparicio (1985, Mexico City) lives and works in Madrid. Trained in dramatic art, he has developed his career in contemporary art and theatrical and film production. In Madrid, he was part of the Travesía Cuatro gallery, where he was the director and opened the Mexican branch in Guadalajara in 2013. He has worked on art, theater, and film projects in Buenos Aires, and was the director of Art Projects Ibiza. He has also been a consultant at the New York-based firm KCM Fine Arts, focusing on mid-career and emerging artists in the international sector. In January 2021, he opened El Chico in Madrid, a hybrid platform for emerging and mid-career Spanish artists. Currently, El Chico has partnered with Estudio César Aréchiga to open the Ladrón [de Guevara] artist residency in Guadalajara, Mexico, dedicated to the internationalization of Spanish artists through the bridge between Guadalajara and Madrid.

Victoria Solano (1977, Madrid) is a consultant specializing in contemporary art projects with a long national and international career in Madrid, London, Berlin, and New York. Until December 2022, she was the director of the Berlin-based Carlier / Gebauer gallery in Madrid for four years. She has also worked in some of the most important galleries on the national art scene, such as Travesía 4 and Pepe Cobo, and internationally, such as Marian Goodman Gallery in New York. She was the coordinator of the first editions of Apertura, the Madrid Gallery Weekend. Institutionally, she has also been responsible for activities at Arco, and worked in the special projects office of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Currently, she also advises Spanish and international collectors as an art advisor.