Let's Get Metaphysical

The philosophical concept of metaphysics explores the relationship between how our mind experiences the world and what that world actually consists of. The middle ground between those two notions can be used as an infinite playground in which artists make impossible connections between the factual reality and constructed, imaginary reality. Those connections deliver the excitement and fascination at the moment of encountering art and intuitively decoding its meaning or reading its story.

Starting from the dreamlike, puzzling effect of such encounters, the artists in this exhibition are frequently seeking new horizons artistically by constructing alternate realities based on elements of everyday life. Let’s Get Metaphysical isn't revolving around metaphysical art but is looking at the works by selected contemporary artists through the correlation between basic metaphysics and artmaking. With a profound and poetic perception of the world and a sensitivity to its emotive nuances, the featured paintings and sculptures are immortalizing familiar visuals as meaningful symbols or attributing them with new, highlighted qualities. Carefully assembled and repurposed flea market discoveries turn into new worlds and storylines under Ana Barriga’s brush, and mundane objects and scenes become almost surreal compositions in Kristof Santy’s timeless visuals. Using their mediums of choice to construct new truths, any aspects of chosen motifs can be reduced or emphasized along with associated emotions and notions.

The employment of unusual iconography or the addition of quirky marks and features suspends the viewer's awareness as the work sometimes transforms into an emotional portal of sorts. By adding familiar and suggestive graphic elements or repurposing existing structures, Jake Clark modifies the archetypal ceramic forms into time and space-traveling vessels. Such an approach induces a sense of seductive ambiguity or wonder, as both common items or occasional human archetypes can be seen in highly subjective ways, absent of preconceived meaning. Playing with the scale and the inherent purpose of the depicted objects, Taylor Mckimens’ still life assemblages lure the viewer with the familiarity of their elements only to flip things around with the extraordinary relationships between them. When used, the figure is often reduced to a mere form, a notion of what we'd recognize as one, or an allegory rather than a particular person. For Magdalena Kirklewska, the body is converted into a delicate, vaporous blur of colorful, tattooed limbs, while Jose Lerma reduces his sitters to an collection of decisively and thickly applied paint on a coarse linen surface. And while inanimate objects earn new qualities by positioning them within unordinary contexts, the human figure seems to be highly objectified and regularly removed from its sentient form. Spatial illusions resulting from these distinctive approaches are filled with surprising surfaces, accentuated light, and intensified depth, constructing what can be described as a metaphysical vision of reality.

Saša Bogojev

Exhibition: 21 of January - 24 of March

Galería Yusto/Giner. Madera 9, 29603 Marbella.