Zielinsky is pleased to present “Insomnio”, a group show by Joaquín Lalanne, Robert Llimós, Nelson Leirner, Luciana Damiani, Paula Scamparini and Salvador Dalí. This exhibition, composed by paintings, photographs, engravings and sculptures, shows the production of six artists from different periods and contexts. Throughout the exhibition we are accompanied by a series of questions: how can we look for something that we cannot reach with the naked eye? How can artists present a world that we still don’t know? The absurd, the surrealism, the magical world and the uncertainty are present in each one of the works in the exhibition - from metaphysical looks about the landscape or objects of mass culture, to scenes of an irrational and delusional dream.
The six artists share the gallery space with works executed between 1960 and 2020. Joaquín Lalanne exhibits a medium-format painting produced in the last year. The artist’s imagination makes us believe in a magical world, inhabited by characters extracted from classic works of the History of Art or Architecture, such as, for example, a fragment of a painting by Giorgio de Chirico or an image of a Greek temple, these elements coexist with the images of Pop culture: cartoons, mass consumer products and Hollywood movies. Lalanne mixes apparently disparate universes in his works, playing with high and low culture, with Surrealism and with the TV animations to offer the viewer this absurd world where access is allowed through dreams and the imaginary of art itself. Nelson Leirner does the same in the “Sotheby’s” series, in which he mixes auction house catalogs with objects found in tourist shops or popular products. The irony of this series and, of course, in all of Leirner’s production, occurs to the extent that the artist brings the art world closer to the world of mass consumption and reflects on how objects in different contexts change meanings and values.
In a second block of the exhibition, the works seem to have emerged from a mystery novel, a dream or a secret society. In “The Divine Comedy”, Salvador Dalí presents his view on hell, purgatory and paradise, in a series of engravings developed in the 1960s commissioned by the Italian Government on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of the birth of Dante Alighieri, but the project was aborted due to controversy in Italy, since the chosen artist was not an Italian. Dalí for his part maintained the idea of the project until the 100 illustrations were completed, later edited into a hundred engravings by Joseph Foret. In the exhibition are two of its paradises and two of its hells. Also present in the exhibition is the sculpture “Abraçada” by Robert Llimós, a sequence of oval shapes developed in polyester and fiberglass that point to the interests that have accompanied the artist since the 2000s: a genome, a distant galaxy not known, a hug. Finally, the photographs of Luciana Damiani and Paula Scamparini exhibited in “Insomnia” reveal fragmented and multiplied bodies of women, perhaps emerged just in the waking moment that precedes the deep sleep phase, in which the perception between reality and fantasy merges. The scenes offer us the space of delirium, of silence and reveal to us days of uncertainty.
