Nova Pantalla is the first exhibition dedicated to the art of videogames in Catalonia. Its aim is to reach both video game fans and people who do not know about them. For this reason, the exhibition has an interactive character, with immersive content and games so that everyone can participate.

“Nova Pantalla” wants to promote the video game as a cultural product of artistic interest, therefore, an immersive video created expressly for the occasion is projected in the space, a piece of work that introduces visitors into video games.

Front of the Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat Art Collection

Jimena Fuertes, who has excelled in contemporary geometric abstraction, arranges these figures without concrete forms in order to represent the flow of water. Underwater, nothing can be the same shape, everything is transformed by the qualities of the liquid state. In this sense, the installation allows the viewer to live the experience of transformation. The ductility of water undoubtedly gives free rein to one's imagination.

 

Ph: Florencia Downes

Ph: Pablo Jantus

Detail of "Liquid Dream"

"Liquid Dream" also generates an emotional impact. This proposal is designed for spectators to enter the room in pairs and experience a more intimate encounter. The play of lights and colors and the vibrating sound also help people to perceive the space, their role in it, and their relationship with others. It is an installation where time does not matter and everything is transformed.

This exhibition aims to form existential questions, but it is also about environmental and social awareness. Water is an essential element for human beings, it transmits peace, makes us happy, and also nourishes us. Jimena Fuertes invites us to live this immersive experience, this liquid dream to stop and experience a real now that is impossible not to enjoy, but also poetically, she warns us that water is a resource that we must protect and defend.

Adrian Grecu is a pioneer in combining traditional media with augmented and virtual reality. The artist started looking for the visual effects of joining real objects with those digitally modeled in 3D since the end of the 90s. His works have won awards and been presented at international exhibitions in London, Seoul, Koga, Sint Niklaas, Gliwicze, Kanagawa, Cheju, Venice.

"The exhibition brought together some of the most important landmarks of the artistic production of Adrian Grecu, one of the most relevant artists active in the sphere of new technologies in Romania. Adrian Grecu is a veteran of the use of digital media and their expressive and conceptual potential.

The RetroPerspectiva project is not only a recuperative exercise - although the retrospective dimension remains obvious, being so necessary in the case of a mature artist with a vast activity - but it also wants and succeeds in being a manifesto of our way of relating to the current world. It's a speech about the utopias and dystopias still present in the collective mind, it's a comment on the idea of power, both political power and its abuses, as well as cutting-edge artistic practices and tools, more precisely their power of visualization and conceptualization, suggested by the defiantly waved flag in the title of the exhibition and which proudly bears the Power symbol specific to electronic instruments," pointed out curator Horea Avram.

"And, like any manifesto, this exhibition has programmatic value: naturally including previous digital works, in two-dimensional format, graphic or pictorial, the artist fertilely speculates in the recent works the direct, moving encounter between the digital and the real facilitated by the use of Augmented Reality. RetroPerspective. A digital manifesto is an exhibition that constitutes itself as a real manifesto of the era in which we live and of our (always) extended experience of this world, one that stands more and more under the sign of the digital".

Adrian Grecu was born in Cluj-Napoca in 1969, he graduated from the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, but also from the Faculty of Physics of Babeș-Bolyai University. He had personal exhibitions in Romania, in Cluj and Bucharest and in the USA. He participated with works in various international graphics festivals in Poland, Japan, Korea, Belgium.

"El Gran Manto" by Ricardo Migliorisi

The history of Paraguay has always been crossed by weaving. Aó, a Guaraní word, refers to textiles in all their formats, from clothing to ornaments, including quilts and tapestries. "Paraguayan folk weavings tell the stories of the people who make them (mostly women) and use them in the domestic or work environment," said Lía Colombino, curator and director of the Museo del Barro's Museum of Indigenous Art.

Throughout the exhibition, the artists address central topics such as the role of women, work, readings of the conquest, popular art, and traditional knowledge through contemporary art. The works of Claudia Casarino, Mónica Millán, Arnaldo Cristaldo, Félix Cardozo and Joaquín Sánchez recover embroidery, lace and traditional fabrics to make women's labor emancipation visible.

"Sí, quería" by Joaquín Sánchez

The works of Marcos Benítez and Karina Yaluk use textiles as a weft to which plant or animal traces are attached. Meanwhile, in the center of the room, Ricardo Migliorisi's "El Gran Manto" (The great mantle) captures the viewers' attention due to its enormous size. It is a 12-meter-long patchwork made up of gobelins, which are carpets of French origin that reveal how tradition has been crossed by colonization. The pieces were intervened with texts from an inaccurate web translator, as a sort of textual and textile Babel.

The artists Osvaldo Salerno and Feliciano Centurión detach themselves from the locals also in terms of tradition, but to remember the domesticity of the sewing machines or the massively used blankets, so close to their histories. Salerno, brings up the language, that other clothing that dresses us; and Centurión, embark on small stories of affection.

Feliciano Centurión

The exhibition "Aó: Textile Episodes of the Visual Arts in Paraguay" is an invitation to delve into Paraguay's art scene, as well as its history and, therefore, the working material of its artists. A common axis throughout the tour is the conception of weaving as writing and the overflowing of stories as a critical activity necessary to think a territory.