Behind the Light

Galeria Pedro Cera is pleased to announce the group exhibition Behind the Light, a project by Jorge Pallarés.

The exhibition brings together a group of ten international artists that making use different languages, all work with the subject light, space and objects that light hides and reveals to the eyes of the observers. Through various processes and mediums:- painting, sculpture, photograph, drawing and film -, the exhibition tries to find out what is hidden behind the light.

Susanne M. Winterling in her work presumes that the photographic image is a way of renewing the gesture, of painting with light. In Poetry and the Looking Glass of the Closet melds ghostly images of Genet, Angela Davis (a feminist activist) and a fin de siecle dandy shows her fascination with mirroring. The show also counts on Cache Colour a photograph where the artist tallies a red square into her hands leading the viewer to the centre of the target.

Lisa Oppenheim is interested in the underappreciated aspects of visual culture: the tell tale expressions of contemporary life which are often overlooked. She seeks to discern the repercussions of significant moments in history, not from the moment itself, but rather the gestures and remainders of the forgotten. At the show we can see one of hers Heliograms, an image of the sun exposed at different times of day and on different days of the month, where the intensity and quality of light between hours and between days changes, sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically.

Jerónimo Elespe makes portraits, landscapes and interior scenes with an eye to the great Spanish painters (Goya, Velázquez…). Mannered portraiture remains Jerónimo´s great strength, but several landscapes are noteworthy for their highly worked surfaces and nocturnal palette. Here in Edith 2010, Afternoon key 2011 and Four Papers 2012 he shows all the subtlety and ambiguity of his work, concealing an odd character behind the nebula into a group of three paintings.

Amy Granat creates abstract films without a camera, using the materials in untraditional ways. The destructive use of color or acid, the scratching and puncturing of the film strip: these manual modifications manifest themselves in a variety of reflections and distortions that, through the process of projection, generate pictorial shapes. In the film 2+1+1+2 (for Niki) she references one late work by Niki de Saint Phalle, La Cabeza (1999), an outdoor sculpture of a skull. As her homage to Saint Phalle, Granat filmed a much smaller, traditional Dia de los Muertos skull.

Jorinde Voigt develops her own visual language, a kind of abstract sign code that seems deeply subjective and individual at first but is abiding by strict rules and systems. Blurring the border between science and art, she analyzes the structures of diverse cultural patterns and natural phenomena. Her work Blickwinkel/ Territorium / Elektrizität, 2008/2012 fills the space with representations of electric impulses leading the observer to the first step of the matter.

Evan Gruzis´ main goal is creating the potential for meaning amidst the post-apocalyptic landscape of empty signs. By using imagery that was once evocative and now is just a husk of a cultural signifier, Evan can foreground his real interest, which is the simple act of looking. He performs a zone where luminescence is embattled by the deep black of India-ink, and images exist both as authentic representations of the object, and as hand-painted icons that float between photography, airbrush and digital technology as it reflected here in Dirty Brain Sky, Benzo Light nº·3 and Palm Shot.

The spatial aspects of the drawings, for Nick Oberthaler, are constructed in relation to a perspective whose vanishing point, within the postcards he uses to take, appears like a window on an off-center horizon. He insists on the ambiguity of images, letting the viewer’s gaze wander and decide which point of reference to focus on within the œuvre. In Oberthaler’s work, the vibrations that emanate from his colored grays are neither visible nor describable, but are nonetheless felt.

Iris Touliatou employs references from a wide range of historical sources such as cinema, modernist architecture, theater design, literature, science and stage magic, Iris Touliatou’s artistic practice takes the form of the visual essay. Built up from a mysterious yet symbolic vocabulary, these essays evoke allusive, ambiguous narratives that meld the real and the unreal, adding layers of interpretation to the complex and contradictory set of practices that we refer to as Modernism as it reflected here in On the breaking act of seeing through the other side of grounds and things, a group of collages and a sculpture.

Conversación by Paloma Polo is a photograph that belongs to The Path of Totality a multifaceted project by the artist. It covers extensive research into the history of European and American expeditions that took place during the 19th and 20th centuries and that were intended to investigate solar eclipses. The path of totality is the track of the Moon’s shadow across Earth during a total eclipse of the Sun. It is in this small proportion of the Earth’s surface that one can see the Sun fully eclipsed by the Moon.

Sam Falls expands his rapidly proliferating vocabulary of forms that address time and exposure. Fall´s interest in light departs from the essential process and material limitations of photography displayed here in Textile with flowers and House with Lattice. He is also showing two fabric pieces, Untitled (Orange) and Untitled (Teal).

Note: The texts reproduced here are mainly quotes from pre-existing texts, either published on the websites of the galleries who represent the artists, or in international specialized press. We wish to thank all the artists represented in the show for their contributions as well as the galleries Silverman, from San Francisco, Klosterfeld, from Berlin, Soledad Lorenzo, from Madrid, Duve Berlin, from Berlin, Maisterravalbuena, from Madrid, Kamm, from Berlin, Emanuel Layr, from Vienna, American Contemporary, from Nueva York, and also the BES Collection, from Lisbon.