About Hermogenes, the line and science fiction

Burgos,

It entails difficulties in learning to read, but for Jonathan Hammer it is possible to find some positive point in dyslexia; He explains that the difficulty in decoding language and words can give rise to a very original process of elliptical coding of visual images and reordering of ideas. And the research around it is the focus of “Dyslexic Twister”, the exhibition that this Chicago artist is now offering at the Caja de Burgos Art Center, a proposal in which this issue is related to spheres as diverse as history, sociology , sexual identities, poetry and the occult.

Paintings, drawings, ceramics and pieces made from exotic skins nourish an exhibition in which the themes overlap and are related, sometimes intentionally forcing these links and without hiding it, as the title of the project itself anticipates. It is usual for Hammer’s exhibitions, regular at the F2 Gallery in Madrid, to contain references to the place where they are based; In this case, allusions to the Camino de Santiago are incorporated through the magician Hermogenes, a probably fictional character from the Passio Sancti Iacobi, a text that recounts the martyrdom of James the Greater, who would try to prevent the saint from spreading the figure of Christ in Judea and Samaria but who would end up surrendering, too, to his word. As expected, this author reverses his role: if, according to the original story, the Apostle baptized the magician and threw his Hebrew books into the sea, the American makes Hermogenes the winner and makes him one of the first figures of a world in which includes illness and joy, freedom, emigration, horror (some pieces refer to the Holocaust) and salvation.

This exhibition is divided into three episodes, representative of fundamental facets of the artist’s production: the first, made up of leather screens, refers to the most narrative and complex aspect of his work; the second, composed of drawings that we can consider extensive paintings on paper, refers to his interest in eastern cultures and their relationship with Jewish tradition; and the last one addresses his, more recent, incursions into the aforementioned ceramics, which has provided him with possibilities for experimentation beyond two-dimensionality and into which he has entered from a more festive than demanding approach.

Jonathan Hammer. Dyslexic Twister. CAB Burgos, 2024

“Dyslexic Twister” is the first of three exhibitions that the CAB will host this summer, until September 29; The second, “Complexity, spider, labyrinth”, stars Pablo Armesto and is a complex installation proposal, but articulated around the line as the plot axis and as a metaphor for any path, interior or physical, traveled according to an idea. first or wandering between options.

This creator, born in Switzerland in 1970, has been working on lighting installations that transform the chromatic perception of the spaces where they are displayed and that are based on the use of luminescent emitters and their refraction to give rise to atmospheres that are both soft and sophisticated. ; He has also shaped wall works and sculptures. In Burgos we will see a compendium of this type of pieces always with the line as the center; one of them, the unpublished Tightropes, tribute to Paul Kleewas at the time his first experiment with fiber optics and the seed of his subsequent use of physical light.

“Complexity, spider, labyrinth” is structured as a visual circuit in which each work has been ensured to provide the viewer with an optical game in which geometric shapes are composed and decomposed and changes in scale provide other perceptual possibilities; Armesto explains what interests him the evidence of the chimerical representation of formats that are not within our reach, both those visible but incomprehensible due to their enormous scale, as well as those reduced and fragmented, be they pulsars, fractal geometries or spiral galaxies.

Pablo Armesto. Complexity, spider, labyrinth. CAB Burgos, 2024

If the installation The color of time generates chromatic lighting effects, similar to those that the sun produces in certain conditions when its ions collide with oxygen and nitrogen particles in the atmosphere, the sculpture Titi-Land It flashes with a small tremor when observed by the public, who activates it involuntarily. In designing it, Armesto was based on drawings of the structure of the nervous system by Ramón y Cajal and on the findings of astronomer Jocelyn Bell on the pulsating starsthe pulsating stars.

Armesto’s most complex job now in Burgos is surely Sequences 24, for its plastic intensity and because he devised it based on his knowledge of biology, bioinformatics and molecular genetics. He sought to recreate the language of molecular intimacy, the activity of any living matter, that of all living beings, in twenty-four linear panels grouped according to the seven groups of chromosomes and their morphology.

Finally, Lorena Amorós has brought “Future Desire” to the CAB, an extension of the “Sisters of Tomorrow” project, which she exhibited last year at the Adora Calvo Gallery in Madrid. It is a reflection on the imagination of science fiction and its relationship with popular culture, feminism and desire.

In his case, he has taken as reference the theories of the philosopher Donna Haraway and has deployed his proposal in enormous charcoal drawings made on the walls of the rooms; He imagines in them a dystopian future, but sometimes suspiciously similar to the present, in which creative and destructive forces coexist and powerful women acquire roles that are also powerful: his science fiction is political theory. He highlights his series of one hundred works on paper Fear the Starwhich he has carried out for almost a decade: they consist of motifs linked to the retrofuturist iconography typical of the pulp and the space opera.

Alicante also exhibits organic sculptures that allude to fiction and have a disturbing appearance, bizarre objects, props taken from cinema, rock and punk music covers or magazines linked to the fan phenomenon built around science fiction.