Galería Zielinsky is pleased to present TAPES: Concentration, Repetition, Drift, the first solo show by Martín Pelenur in Barcelona. Pelenur presents a new set of works made with paper tape and a series of interventions designed specifically for the gallery space.
Martín Pelenur is an Uruguayan artist who lives and works in Punta del Este, Uruguay. Pelenur defines himself as a painter, activity that he understands as a way of thinking.
As the title suggests, the exhibition proposes a method to produce Art through a specific medium: the tape. The paper tape is an industrial material of frequent use to which Pelenur has given a new role, vehicle and means to produce im- ages based on geometric patterns. These patterns are obtained from equations that the artist has developed over the years in combination with a meticulous manual production process. In the words of Sol Lewit “... since art is a vehicle for the transmission of ideas through form, the reproduction of form only reinforces the concept”. Pelenur suggests to design a set of processes, systematize them, to obtain, as well as with a matrix, different visual patterns. Hence, equations that design patterns, combinations that represent the exercise of the form. The application of paper tape results in three-dimensional squares or patterns, which result in lines, squares or rectangular shapes in blacks, beiges, blues; a warm south palette.
A group of repetitive processes using a particular material and situations dialogue to find the human sense of all this, he recalled in a recent conversation. Far from the next generation digital technologies, Pelenur develops his own techniques and technologies to produce his art and craftwork. With great dedication, he achieves repetitions of motives, techniques that seek to reduce their form and visuality to their most basic states. The intricate patterns of lines and geometrical shapes emerge to emulate the delicate nature of human thought. Immersed in the technical problems that these works require, he invests countless hours to produce them. A minimal variation in the process allows a new group of possible outcomes. Pelenur’s methods of creation are immersed in diverse aesthetic traditions, they compose a time on their own: pure, simple, with a sense of forms and structures, lines and plans in an effort to provide these works with a personal and political relevance. They suggest through concentration, time and observation ways of interaction with the world that surrounds us.
The exhibition is then structured around a work premise, in which the artist investigates a medium and a method. The premises are the starting point of these works in which the artist strives to achieve results that he can repeat in the future. Materials and supports are indivisible.
Dimensions are variable, and the final configuration places them. Martín Pelenur understands painting as an experimental and mental process, he is resolved to create a context that suggests us to look in a certain way. He seeks for the medium to speak while he encourages a dialogue between forms. His work creates a space through a gesture that bears the mark of time. Functional lines, elementary forms, geometric structures that evoke grids, patterns that have their origins in systematic actions; arranged forms that lead us to a profusion of effects that build our own language. Pelenur produces and experiments on processes simultaneously to achieve what appears to be a calculated surprise. His works are minimalist, but not necessarily, formalists, but not in their entirety. Painting, geometry, abstraction, there is so much information that one begins to define his own space.
When entering his studio in La Barra de Maldonado one can read the following sentence transcribed on the wall: “Concentrate on what you are doing, do not get distracted, this is your time”- something like a repetition mantra in the key of artistic production. The slogan seems to be taken from a self-help manual but it was found somewhere on the Internet.
This was object of long conversations with the artist and a reflection on time and ways of doing things in the contemporary world. To concentrate, to not get distracted, to focus and to realize that time is one’s own seems to be a simple task, but to be true, it isn’t. We live in the era of the superabundance of images that circulate at a speed never imagined before. Screens dominate the landscape in which we move with a retinal anxiety that makes this slogan almost impossible to achieve.
For more than ten years Pelenur has been dedicated to travel the territory to obtain data to allow him to continue painting, do not forget that Pelenur is a painter. Being a lover of maps and drifts, he explores in the territory the geometries that he abstracts, reduces and composes; he defines his method as “Extractor”. “The Extractor” is a way of revealing the walk, as a way to obtain information through the experience of walking, so as not to reconstruct the lived image but to use it as an input to keep on thinking.
Friedrich Nietzsche said that there is one thing one has to have: either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art and knowledge. I like to think about the latter and understand art as an essential part of this search. Concentration makes this mission possible. Artistic thinking is a non-linear process that sometimes allows to recognize answers even before the questions are articulated and act on them. This group of works celebrate, in its rigor, the method and research as a fundamental part of the artist’s practice. It establishes links with forms that lead to tendencies derived from modern aesthetic paradigms. It uses the language of painting and installation to mobilize and try to reach that place of experience that connects us with the essence of what we are or what we thought we were.
Martin Craciun
Montevideo, April 2019
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Martin Pelenur was born in 1977 and studied at the Fundación de Arte Contemporáneo. Pelenur’s work has been exhibited in Uruguay, Argentina, Berlin and the United States. It has been the subject of individual and collective international exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires, the Art Nexus Foundation in Bogotá, the Figari Museum in Montevideo, the Artemisa Gallery in New York and the Sayago & Pardon Foundation in Los Angeles. Pelenur has received numerous awards, among them the Project Bitácora of the Ministry of Culture and Education of Uruguay (2015), the FEFCA Grant of the Ministry of Culture and Education of Uruguay (2012), the Paul Cézanne Prize from the French Alliance in Montevideo (2011), and the Goethe Institut scholarship in Berlin (2010). The artist currently lives and works in La Barra, Maldonado, Uruguay.
Martín Craciun (Montevideo, 1980) Curator, professor and researcher in the field of contemporary art and contemporary culture. He has developed projects, exhibitions, audiovisuals, installations and concerts in a many exhibition spaces and cultural centers of Uruguay, as well as projects in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Austria, the United States, Germany, Switzer- land, Spain, Israel and Italy. Co-curator of the Uruguayan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in the years 2010 and 2014. He participated in the XII Bienal of Havana (2015), the 7th Bienal of Mercosur (2008) and the 11th Bienal of Mercosur. He was curator of the Uruguayan participation in the XI and XII Bienal de Artes Mediales of Chile 2015 and 2017, invited curator in the IX SIART Bienal of La Paz, Bolivia, invited curator in Lisbon, Iboreamerican Capital of Culture 2017. He curated the program Cultural de la Feria de Arte Contemporáneo Este Arte (2016, 2017, 2018). He is general director and artistic director of SOCO Festival; international festival of advanced music and contemporary culture of Uruguay. He has published 4 books as an editor, Alexina b (2007), 5 narratives, 5 buildings (2010), La Aldea Felíz (2014), Collaboration (2014). He is a professor at the Faculty of Human Sciences and the Faculty of Engineering and Technology of Universidad Católica del Uruguay.
