Van Riel Gallery presents 'Smoke over Vanguards' by Pablo Lapadula

Smoke on vanguards, exhibits the latest production of paintings and drawings made by capturing on paper the smoke that comes from a domesticated candle. This series of works constitute the work of a year of work where a formal and conceptual synthesis of a long trajectory in the investigation of the grammatical possibilities of smoke in the construction of a personal visual poetic is sought.

In them the waste of the combustion of urban activity released into the atmosphere in the form of smoke, (which gives rise to the geological term of Anthropocene) is reused to investigate chance and the aesthetic need in the search for an unconscious imaginary, buried in the depth of being. In the exhibition, retinal encounters have been rescued that allow rethinking the concepts of originality and survival of the image, understood as knowledge packaged in visual format.
As in scientific practice, where the researcher searches programmatically for bibliographic references that mirror the facts obtained to map them in the great atlas of knowledge, these smoke registers on paper were obliquely chosen to go to the encounter of possible filiations in the panopticon of art . The images are selected according to their ability to reverberate on a background of vanguards of the early twentieth century. But this simple game of surface similarities seems not to respond to the simple chance of mimesis. The image is the result of a form of movement between doing and thinking, which in this case, given the impregnation in the daily life of a scientific practice, suggests a tendency towards a protocol of purist action that seems to go towards a synthesis formal. This is expressed through the reduction of plastic variables to be used: smoke and watercolor as variable of light / dark one, and chromatic the other. As if in stripping, the skeleton or the minimum functional unit on which the power of a work rests could emerge. This strategy, which pays tribute to the scientific work of the last two centuries, seems to work as a springboard towards an anachronistic leap that could position the viewer before an artistic phenomenon of another century.

Inauguration: Thursday, May 3, 7 pm
Gallery van Riel. Juncal 790, PB. C.A.B.A.