United we rise part 2

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Bendana | Pinel Art Contemporain is pleased to present « United we rise part 2 », an evolutive group show.

Débora Bolsoni (Brazil): The installation (No name, but names), can be understood as a group of people marching in protest, or as a cemetery where cardboard silhouettes would serve as gravestones. Carts carrying the silhouettes create instability in the whole. "Individually, they have no names, but together they acquire a presence," says Bolsoni. At first glance, the works deal with the subject of drawing and its boundaries with sculpture, but on closer inspection, one notices that they also deal with the individual.

In the digital photography animations Arquivo Fantasia [Fantasy Archive], Dias & Riedweg (Brazil; Switzerland) revisit the analog contact sheet archives and the professional activity of the American photographer Charles Hovland. For more than 20 years, Hovland published the same classified ad in the "Village Voice", offering his services to photograph people's sexual fantasies. He has archived more than 3000 people in black and white 35mm film.

In the series of photographs Caleidoscópicas, Dias & Riedweg re-photograph the lay-outs of the male-nude magazines published by Charles Hovland in the 80s and 90s in New York. The artists set a kaleidoscope between their camera and Hovland’s original layouts. The results are fragments of the male bodies provoked by the mirrors of the kaleidoscope, re-evoking thus the mirroring effect of the analogical camera formerly used by Hovland. Again, the artists reinforce the kaleidoscope mirrors with sand-jetted engravings directly done on the glass that frame their final photographs.

Maria Friberg (Sweden), questions preconceived notions of identity in contemporary society. The Days of Eyes series, produced at the time of the European High Court's landmark decision on the " right to be forgotten", depicts human figures in lush tropical vegetation; among the creepers, heavy and disturbing black cables merge with plant life.

Over the past few years, Adam Jeppesen (Denmark) has explored different materials and printing techniques. The blue colour obtained by cyanotype, as well as the title of the series, The Pond, underlines the impression that these hands, transferred from negative to linen, float in the water.

The recent work of Steven Le Priol (France) revolves around the question of the real and its double, the figure of the author and ambiguous images. The Substitute painting series begun in 2019 is a deployment of this first work. Here the central question is that of the mimicry of figurative painting. Priol addresses the issue of reproduction by choosing to work from "bad" models (look-alikes, wax statues, stones and artificial plants...).

The work of Niccolò Montesi (Italy) reflects the life, architecture and landscape of the remote island of Pantelleria. The island without a natural source of fresh water, draws it directly from the sea and distributes it through a system of aqueducts photographed from different angles by Montesi.

Voluntarily to let the viewer approach and penetrate her works, or for her to be able to project herself into them without being completely involved, Christiane Pooley (Chile) represents many views of indeterminate landscapes. Pooley elaborates compositions that mix different temporalities and, through distance, also treats, as if in an undercoat or double surface, a burning topicality referring to all the uprooted people the world knows today.

Florencia Rodriguez Giles (Argentina): Biodelica is a series of drawings about the force of life (bios), which manifests itself (delia) in everything, in the bodies, in the pleasure of those who are capable of it, in the imagination, in the encounters between species, in all the worlds that are being invented and emerging at every moment in the biosphere.

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra (Chile) is known for her graphic work on different types of recycled and wax-coated paper. This act is part of the process of her drawing which gives the sheet an extra material dimension. While her creations are based on a vision of life, death and sexuality that is subtle, whimsical and full of humour, political resonances are sometimes suggested, evoking with restraint the violence of power.