The winning artists were Jimena Merino and María Esteve, who were awarded the first and second prize respectively. The works of both of them, together with those of Erre Gálvez, Daniel Salorio and Romero Doncel, make up the Art Regeneration exhibition recently inaugurated at the Mad is Mad gallery in Madrid, where they will remain until December 4.
The common link between all artists is that they have developed their works by reusing materials. In the case of the award-winners, rubber dust from out-of-use tires. Pieces of wood that have been part of furniture, advertising photos from old magazines and plant remains found in different places have been the materials through which the five have expressed their creativity. In short, all of them have used things that “are no longer valid” to make into works of art.
In the words of Rafa Ruiz, one of the founding partners of this space dedicated to contemporary creation, “Art generation has the aim of telling that there is no waste but second lives, opportunities to recreate, to regenerate.”
A second life, the project
It is a project that began as a point on the line begun by recovering the first Bustarviejo railway station, Madrid, – disused for years and with a very deteriorated building -, to be the headquarters of a cultural project where “develop programs of research, reflection, training and artistic transformation activities, establishing a dialogue with the community in which we are inserted.”
From there, following the dotted line that are the different activities carried out in this space, to knocking on the door of Signus, where they persuaded Isabel Rivadulla, its Director of Communication, to carry out a project “aimed at artists who will incorporate recycled materials. Because we have already seen tires in sculptures; But, the materials of the tire, rubber, steel and textile, surely many artists would not have thought of using it. It is a way that, from an artistic point of view, you can experiment with this material – specifically rubber dust from tires at the end of their useful life – and transform it into works like those done by Jimena Merino and María Esteve. , explained Rivadulla in his speech at the opening of the exhibition and presentation of the awards.
«Recovery is in the DNA of Translators of the Wind, said Miguel Ángel Invarato, promoter of the entity. «This part of giving a second life to spaces and materials, he continued, was what led us to meet Signus and, really, we are talking about the same thing, with the same arguments.» The result is this proposal of “artistic creation from the reuse of materials from the recovery of tires once their useful life is exhausted: primarily rubber (a material that can give more play, as it can be presented in granules of different colors and diameters), but also textiles and steel cables.
For Invarato, this new edition of Second Life “has been very interesting. Because year after year the number of projects sent to us increases. And, because the artists have already really experimented with the material, provided by Signus, which is apparently very industrial, but which gives rise to creative research. Both Jimena Merino and María Esteve have left their own mark in the use of this material in the works that we show now and for which they have won the awards, which consist of a stay in the artist residence of the Translators space of the Wind”.
The works
Jimena Merino, who declares herself very focused on the rural environment, «I have tried to address the concept of the gap, of the void. When playing with fantasy and exploring that idea from various perspectives, I noticed the cracks, something that appears everywhere but goes unnoticed. But they can contain different things, depending on each person’s imagination.
Merino has created a kind of biomaterial “by mixing rubber powder with glycerin, vinegar, water, rabbit glue in different proportions, with different charges, to make a kind of mold of those cracks in the ground, and transfer them to the paper surface and show three drawings, which are like possible explanations of what would be inside those cracks.
María Esteve, who could not attend the inauguration because she is one of those affected by the damage of October 29 in Valencia, through a text read by Miguel Ángel Invarato, explains her work as “a symbiosis between the rural and the urban and the environment. In the three works he has created a game between research with materials and subsequent action, the trace of time, of man’s intervention on nature, and of the elements in contact with the material with which the artist works.
Wood, photos and plant elements
Daniel Salorio creates sculptures with tree bark, pieces of trunks, with which he feels that “discovering the subtlety of plant forms and unraveling their chaotic network leads me to find parallels between botanical design and my artistic references and moods; which allows me to dive into my fantasies. These coincidences are the basis of the creative process that gives shape to my sculptures.
For Romero Doncel, who confesses to feeling “fascination with abandoned objects, ruined houses in the countryside, with wood damaged by sun and rain, the wooden gates of old town houses and their worn paint that are so familiar to me” , it is the recovered pieces of wood that make up his works as paintings of geometric reliefs of colors worn by the passage of time, the elements and use. «My house is full of pieces that I collect and they give me the feeling of a village. Any of them can have a meaning for me and, putting them together, these things come out.
For Erre Gálvez, collage is a technique that “fascinated me when I discovered it when I was 15 or 16 years old and that is still recycling. You take a lot of material that already exists to transform it into something else. To the exhibition Art Regeneration has contributed a series of collages made with original tire advertising from the 1950s, mainly published in Life magazine, which was incredible. The photos are glued by hand on old paper and the frames are made by me, also with wood that I take and age, so that they have a connection with my work.
Certainly about the exhibition, in the words of Rafa Ruiz “the concept of a beacon of sustainability flies over. So that society is aware of everything we consume, everything we throw away and the importance of giving value and new uses to this waste. “That can be converted into raw material, even for works of art or design pieces.”
