Performed Painting: Rosana Antolí, Ferran Gisbert, Alan Sastre, Vicky Uslé

About

Physical and visual limits are probed and tools or technologies deployed to extend the artist’s reach, expand the extent of a brushstroke or re-present the colour spectrum visible to the human eye. The image may resemble a movement-map for the eye to wander over and revisit, trailing the artist’s hand. This is action painting - or an idea of action painting – we can no longer be certain.

Alan Sastre uses the conventions of painting to challenge the limits of visual representation, using perspective to create an analytical maze which blurs the distinction between imagination and reality. Through the working and reworking of the paint, the canvas becomes an ambiguous space, both painting and sculpture, breaching the barrier between picture plane and spatial illusion. This paradox creates an ambiguity that challenges our habitual way of reading images; while some answers are produced, new uncertainties are also raised. 

As a dancer, Vicky Uslé is interested in the interactions between dance and painting. Continuously investigating the analogies between the blank canvas and the empty stage, her brushstrokes are the result of spontaneous movements where the hazardous plays a key role. Architecture is another incentive in her paintings. Are they plans for forgotten buildings? Ephymeral burrows built by industrious animals? A synaesthesia-like mapping of an internal geography? Fantasy is essential here, both abstract and distinctly architectural. The images are places to see in to and out from, drawing you in through the surface of the paint, which folds and unfolds, creating entirely new parameters, organic and lucid, often so diffused that it moves just beyond the reach of the viewer. 

While Vicky Uslé compares the forms she creates on the pictorial surface with the movements of a dancer on the stage, Rosana Antolí's practice incorporates both painting and dance.  For this exhibition, Antolí will perform her critical and deconstructive response to Yves Klein’s work Antrophometries, where female bodies covered in blue were manipulated, like human brushes, to represent the medium and subject of the art work, as well as being the object for the male gaze. In Antoli’s act, however, a female dancer with a “real body” is in control, performing a ritualistic dance which addresses  female empowering and re-enactment of primitive forms of movement. Her highly physical and improvised movements  will be  imprinted, also  in blue paint,  on the gallery’s floor and walls, and will spill out into the street, where a group of volunteers, summoned by the artist through the social media, will join in as a  gesture in favour of the democratisation of art.  

The materiality  of painting in the work of Ferran Gisbert eludes language and meaning to re-claim the creative process of painting as a pure form of expression and performative intervention. Form is generated by the action of painting. Employing a handmade paintbrush corresponding to the artist's own hight, the performative act is imprinted directly on the gallery walls, registering the movements of the artist, full of gesture, speed and vitality. 

This exhibition has been curated with and supported by SCAN (Spanish Contemporary Art Network)

Rosana Antolí was born in Alcoy, Spain in 1981 and lives and works in London. She holds a Fine Arts Degree from the Polytechnic University of Valencia and she recently obtained a Masters in Performance and Moving Image. Dept. Sculpture at Royal College of Art, London. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally such as Volta 09 (Basel); Buzzcut Performance Festival (Manchester); CA2M (Madrid); Museo CDAN (Spain); CEART Museum (Spain); Vyner Collective (London, UK); Museo Barjola (Asturias, Spain); Testbed (London, UK), Royal Holloway (London, UK), Museo Delf (Paises Bajos), Modular Beta Festival (Berlin), CCEC (Córdoba, Argentina), Local Projects (New York) and La Casa Encendida (Madrid, Spain). 

Ferran Gisbert was born in Alcoy, Spain in 1982 and he lives and works in Lima, Perú. He holds a Fine Arts Degree from the Polytechnic University of Valencia and in 2006, he obtained an Erasmus scholarship from the ENSBA école Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Recent exhibitions include Galería Luis Adelantado, Madrid, Spain, 2014; Galería Aural, Alicante, Spain, 2013; “Temple” Colegio de España, Cité Universitaire International de Paris, 2012. Public interventions include 'Oasis', Alicante and 'Puño y Letra', Poliniza Festival, Polytechnic University of Valencia, 2014. 

Alan Sastre was born in Barcelona, Spain in 1977 and lives and works in London. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona and graduated in Pictorial Procedures and Mural Techniques at the School of Art and Design Llotja, Barcelona. In 2006, he obtained a Seneca scholarship from the Fine Arts School at the University of Granada, a scholarship at the Rodriguez Costa Foundation in the same city and in 2007 the Fellowship at The Cooper Union School of Art in New York. Recent exhibition include Rainbow Merchant Schwartz Gallery, London; 'Contemporary Visions V', Beers Contemporary, London, 2015; 'Shuffle Pavillion', Kreuzeberg, Berlin; 'Hard Hat', Library Club, London, 2014; 'Kaleidoscope', Mowlem Studios, London, 2013; Swab Art Fair, Barcelona; International Painting Prize, Focus Abengoa Foundation, Seville, 2008; 'The Exchange Show', Cooper Union Foundation, New York, 2007; 'How narrow a croissant', Upper Room at The Palace of the Counts of Gabia, Granada, 2006.  His work has been included in public and private collections such as Das Eschmertal Museum, Germany; Collection Font-Irwin, Rodriguez Costa Foundation; College of Art and Design LLotja; University of Barcelona.  

Vicky Uslé was born in Santander, Spain in 1981 and lives and works between New York and Saro, Cantabria. She holds a BA from The Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence Rhode Island. Vicky shows with Galería Travesía Cuatro, in Madrid; Alexander Levy Galerie, in Berlin and Galería Siboney in Santander. Solo exhibitions include: ‘Observatorio’, Travesía Cuatro, Madrid, Spain, 2015; ‘Weightlessness Encounter’, Alexander Levy, Berlin, Germany, 2014;  ‘Open Space’, Galería Siboney, Santander, Spain, 2013; ‘Building Saja’, Galerie van der Mieden, Antwerpen, Belgium, 2012; ‘Woodshedding’, Alexander Levy, Berlin, Germany, 2012; ‘Absence + Deployment’, Galería Travesía Cuatro, Madrid, Spain, 2012; ‘Into Habitats’, Galería Travesía Cuatro, Madrid, Spain, 2010; ‘El Domador de Caracoles’, The Beaux Arts Santander, Spain, 2009; ‘Walking Berry’, Galería Travesía Cuatro, Madrid, Spain, 2008; ‘Amulet’, Galería Siboney, Cantabria, Spain, 2008; ‘Take Away’, MCO Arte Contemporanea, Oporto, Portugal. A selection of group exhibitions include: ‘Imago Mundi Project: Made in Spain’, CAC Málaga, Spain, 2015; ‘Incomplétudes’, Espai Tactel, Valencia, Spain, 2015; ‘The Clearing in the Forest’, Tokyo Cervantes Institute, Japan, 2014; ‘The Last Brucennial’, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, New York, USA, 2014; ‘Ut pictura…’, Galería Isabel Hurley , Málaga, Spain, 2013; ‘Miradas de Mujeres en la Colección Norte’, Central Library of Cantabria, Santander, Spain, 2013; ‘The Shadow Line’ CSV Cultural Centre, New York, USA, 2011; ‘ Highlights of CAM’, Chelsea Art Museum, New York, USA, 2011; ‘Geometry and Gesture’, Elga Wimmer PCC, New York, USA, 2010; ‘Abstraction Revisited’, Chelsea Art Museum New York, USA. 2010; ‘ Conversations’ with Polly Apfelbaum, Galería Travesía Galería Cuatro, Madrid, 2007. Some of her works can be seen in the collection of Caja Madrid; the ‘Colección Norte’ of the Ministry of Culture of Cantabria; the Museum of Pamplona in Navarra and the Simon de Pury Art Collection of Phillips in New York.