En la zona gris

García | Galería takes part in this year’s Jugada a 3 bandas with a project curated by Virginia Torrente titled “En la zona gris” [In the Grey Area], including works by AllanSteffenRobert, Christian Bagnat, Adrian Martínez, and Belén Rodríguez González.

En la zona gris (In the Grey Area). A project by Virginia Torrente.

The grey area is out there, it gravitates close to us.

A grey area is a place that has not been clearly identified, a space where meteorites and manned spaceships headed to… well, the destination is unknown, as is the date of arrival. But grey areas are also found on earth, in the darkness of a forest during the night, in the interior of an abandoned house… even inside our own bodies. It is still an indeterminate area of research, where the narrative is more fictitious than real, where the truth ends, or whether it is just another trick used by the artist to immerse the viewer in that grey area.

Outer space ceased to be a remote frontier a long time ago. The grey area provides a reflection on the cosmos, broadly speaking, somewhere between the literal and the outer space, the terrestrial and the galactic. An abstract space split into reality and fiction, light and darkness. Inside the grey area, be it where it may, there is the possibility of unsuspected events taking place, in a diluted and indefinite, dislocated time, where objects and subjects share a state of zero gravity.

But what do we look for inside the grey area? Contact with unknown civilisations? Better conditions for the future of humanity? To exit the orbit of our own planet, merely out of weariness and boredom?

The artists participating in this exhibition share an interest for that which is hidden, concealed behind things, floating in the stratosphere… be they ideas, garbage left behind by human expeditions to outer space, or personal internal sensations. The interpretation of the grey area carried out by each of them is as open as the world, made up of forces and matter, unstable, ready to explore, to collide… or to gravitate placidly. The grey area does not present any final conclusions. Instead, it is the metaphor of a changing situation that is in a continuous process of evolution. Tending towards the best or the worst. Just like the work of the artists.

Belén Rodríguez, AllanSteffenRobert, Adrián Martínez, and Christian Bagnat delve into the grey area as a place within which to experiment and create, a place that has not yet been treaded upon, an unexplored danger zone, where new ideas, connections and sources of inspiration can be sought in order to progress in their work. Every artist walks along the grey area at a certain moments of his or her working process. The studio becomes a space capsule that ploughs through the galaxies, with a temporary supply spaceship at García Galería.

AllanSteffenRobert | Steffen Jorgensen (Lageskov, Denmark, 1983), Robert Kjaer Clausen (Nyborg, Denmark, 1979), Allan Nicolaisen (Viborg, Denmark, 1982). Straw Thoughts: The interior of a spaceship, with a crew of three people. Each one appears to have a well-defined function. In the film, the scenes take place both inside and outside the ship. A series of events of an alien character start to occur, disturbing the daily chores of interplanetary navigation. A new entity joins the patrol of 3 astronauts navigating the ship, taking them to a new place, on a route that is unknown to them. All this leads them to ask themselves: What is exactly our task here?

Belén Rodríguez (Valladolid, Spain, 1981). During the month of December of every terrestrial year, the meteor showers are a growing phenomenon that can be seen from earth thanks to the use of telescopes. In 2012 and the beginning of 2013 they have been particularly intense. One of them appears to have reached the earth. Here, inside an exhibition.

Christian Bagnat (Cipolletti, Argentina, 1971). As he himself says, the grey area might be closer to Greece than to the MIR space station, at least that is how the artist sees it. Bagnat always draws intimate, everyday situations under the aura of the unknown. More than anything, the grey area is an attitude before life. A grey area represented as an area where civilisations clash, where humans beings communicate… as best they can.

Adrián Martínez (Ibiza, Spain, 1984). Adrián Martínez likes to remember things his own way. How he remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened (to quote David Lynch). Sheltered in a grey area of filmic invocations, his drawings are -often nighttime- recreations of scenes where something has happened or is about to, fragmented like a negative that provides us with a small clue from a film, a clue that can lead us to paths that force us to develop our fantasy and imagination.

Curator: Virginia Torrente (Bilbao, 1963) graduated from the Complutense University in Madrid with a degree in History of Art. Between 1993 and 1999, she worked as curator, then Chief Curator at the Colección Arte Contemporáneo, and held the same position at the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid from 2000 until 2003. Between 2004 and 2006, she was in charge of the Visual Arts department of Casa de América in Madrid, with an intensive programme of over 20 exhibitions per year. She began working as a freelance curator in 2007. She has given lectures and published texts, always related to the field of contemporary art, both in Spain and abroad. Since 1999, she is a member of the independent curating project titled Doméstico.