Para ayer
For yesterday
Bipersonal exhibition with Luis Morejon (Ecuador, 1998) curated by Rene Ponce, Guayaquil, Ecuador, november 2020.
ΒΏWhat do abandon and dilapidated places have that make them so attractive in the eyes of artists?
I will answer with another question:
Where do the artists who represent these spaces live?
Perhaps, you could also ask:
Where do these artists dream of living?
Spaces that remember who we were or what others were like. There is no house, no place, no space, pure promises is the territory when it is represented from the imaginary that dreams and memories grant. Residues of past territories, although their pasts are only recent. memory or the archive places the artists before new and overwhelming experiences.
The novice artists Francesca Palma and Luis MorejΓ³n idealize the notion of the urban and the rural, in their paintings the geometry of the city and the good pulse of the countryside, are key to understanding the distribution of the utopian in each of their pretensions of place. A treacherous memory is persevering when reconstructing an event or place, not always forcing the memory is successful, but yes, it is always fantastic. This encounter with memory or the archive places the artists before new and overwhelming experiences.
What strength does the past have that always wants to come back?
Perhaps we are the piece of a great fabric that comes through the world unraveling until it reaches a present that is not always valued, rejoins the past in any way, it is a risk, it leaves the individual dissatisfied and does not remember who he is. The works of Palma and MorejΓ³n have something of this, they point to the behavior of memory and forgetting. Fiction comes to the rescue when they can no longer remember, altering their biographies to such an extent that their origins become mythological. Ultimately, the authority of myth is the authority of the past.
Rene Ponce (Ecuador, 1984)
November, 2020