“¡Qué pena!" di Josefina Alen e “Trama” di Martín Fernández

Gilda Lavia Gallery (Rome) is pleased to host the two solo exhibitions ¡Qué pena! by Josefina Alen and Trama by Martín Fernández, curated by Antonio Villa, which will open on Monday 18 March at 6pm.

Josefina Alen creates her works on papier-mâché and newspaper; the artist presents a new series of paintings in which memory plays a central role. Through memories she enlarges, deforms and relocates everyday objects, often inspired by 90s pop imagery.

The choice of the newspaper as a canvas makes the factual reality of the news blurry, in favor of the subjectivity of a brushstroke that gives us a corpus of objects that emerge from the memory imprinted on the fragility of the paper that always threatens to break.

The artist herself comments on her practice as follows: “Faced with bad news in the news with large objects, I can say that nothing in the world is boring and that at high speed everything becomes attractive and absurd.”

Fernández instead uses drawing as an expressive platform, creating a language in which different imaginaries coexist to deal with the theme of the representation of space.

Black backgrounds, marked geometries, dissolved stairs and lattices transform his drawings into psychic spaces, expressions of a symbolic and changing imagination that invites the observer to immerse themselves in this planimetric progression.

The curator Antonio Villa writes: “Monochromatic rhythms and material discharges generate shiny surfaces, deep opacities, mirages. Almost mantric graphics and indeterminate shapes hide or reveal themselves depending on the light and the angle of view. Fernández considers these compositions soft, agile and multifaceted, like landscapes”.