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MOMENTUM AiR
Máximo González // Iván Buenader
2 August – 7 November 2021
Máximo González (b. 1971 in Argentina. Lives and works in Alicante, Spain and Mexico City, Mexico.)
Argentinian artist Máximo González is widely known for his massive immersive mixed-media installations, as well as large-scale collages made out of money. The currency collages, reminiscence of the political wall paintings of the Mexican muralists, express the complications of a consumer culture that exploits natural resources, produces waste, and lately drives nations to bankruptcy. González’s work – often poetic, always political – focuses on the environment, education, and the evolution of cultural value systems.
González has held 46 solo shows and participated in 168 group shows. Selected solo exhibitions include: ‘POGO’ at Hospicio Cabañas Museum, Guadalajara (MX); Magnificent Warning at Stanlee & Rubin Center, El Paso (USA); Playful, CAFAM, Los Angeles (USA); ‘Walk among Worlds’ at Casa de América, Madrid (ES) y Fowler Museum, Los Angeles (USA), ‘Something like an answer to something’, Artane gallery, Istanbul (TUR); ‘Project for the reutilization of obsolete vehicles’ at Travesía Cuatro Gallery, Madrid (ES) and Project B, Milano (IT); ‘PISAR’ at Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires (ARG); ‘Greenhouse effect’ at Art&Idea, Mexico City. Selected group shows include: ‘The Supermarket of Images’ at Jeu de Paume in Paris and at Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, China; ‘Memoria del porvenir’, MUSAC collection (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León), Spain; Viva México! at Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and at BWA Awangarda Gallery, Wroclaw, Poland; ‘The possibility of everything’ at Nuit Blanche Toronto (CA); ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’, Poetics of the handmade exhibition at MOCA LA (USA); ‘The tree: from the sublime to the social’ at the Vancouver Art Gallery (CA); ‘Fine Line’ at Museo de Las Americas in Denver (USA); The lines of the hand at MUAC, Mexico City; ‘2nd Polygraphic Triennial of San Juan’, Latin America and the Caribbean, Puerto Rico; ‘Mexico: Poetry/Politics’, San Francisco State University (USA) and at Nordic Watercolor Museum, Gothenburg (SE); ‘Tiempo de Sospecha’, Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City.
Máximo González is also the founder of “Changarrito Project”, a non-profit cultural initiative he launched in 2004 in Mexico City. What began as an underground subversive project has evolved into a platform to promote, support and show the work of visual artists, novelists, poets, curators, designers, performers, filmmakers, which has so far has exhibited more than 5,000 works by more than 350 emerging artists. Changarrito was invited twice to participate at Mexico Pavilion in the Venice Biennale (2011 and 2013), and has, since 2012 been operating in cooperation with Mexic-Arte Museum (Texas, USA).
Iván Buenader (b. 1972 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Lives and works in Alicante, Spain and Mexico City, Mexico).
ván Buenader is an Argentinian writer and visual artist based between Alicante and Mexico City. He graduated in Computer Science from the University of Buenos Aires. He has exhibited his work (painting, photography, video, installation) in contemporary art venues in Latin America, the United States, Canada, India and Europe, while participating in numerous artist residencies – including MOMENTUM AiR in August – November 2021. He has conceptualized and produced collective interdisciplinary projects including poetry, music, dance and performance (‘CFW Poet Agency’). He is author of 11 novels and 6 books of experimental poetry.
Selected solo exhibitions include: FUTURA Galerie des Artistes (Puerto Vallarta) 2019; Brain Clouds (SometimeStudio, Paris) 2017, Monochromatic Fantasy (Lizieres, Epaux-Bezu), A house full of boxes is a place full of secrets (CentralTrak residence, Dallas TX) 2015, Face down on the sun (Museum of Contemporary Art of Aguascalientes, Mexico) 2014.
Group exhibitions include: FUTURA Alc Video Art Festival (Alicante) 2019; Untitled (Omar Alonso Galería, Puerto Vallarta) 2019; we the people (Montalvo Arts Center), Mikaela (San Miguel de Allende) , Studio Lisboa 018, La Verdi Mexico , CDMX, 2018, Rosadea (Play Video Art, Corrientes Capital), Processes in art (Chancellery Museum, CDMX), Luck of the Draw (DiversWorks, Houston TX), Hotel x Hotel (Carmen Thyssen Museum of Malaga, Malaga and Factory of Art and Development, Madrid) 2017, Machemoodus (La 77, CDMX), In the lobby (Liliana Bloch, Dallas TX), Les sentiers de la création (Galerie du Lycée Jean de La Fontaine, Château-Thierry, and Gallerie du College Jacques Cartier, Chauny, France) 2016, AAMI Foundation (Mexico City ) , Tell me what you think of me (Texas State University Galleries) 2015, Then / Now / Next, (Gladstone Hotel, Toronto) , Floating Memories (WhiteSpider Project) 2014, Imaginary Archetypes (57th Alley) , Be or Not South (José Luis Cuevas Museum, Museum of the City of Querétaro, Museum of Art of Ciudad Juárez, Museum of Art Co Time of Tamaulipas), Argenmex (Centro Bella Época), Inheritance (MACA Alicante, Hospicio Cabaña, GACX Xalapa, La Esmeralda, Art Careyes, Lakeeren Mumbai, Cloister Sor Juana, among others), Transitios (Changarrito group show, Artpace, San Antonio TX) 2013; Migrant Suitcases (Memory and Tolerance Museum, DF; David J. Guzman Museum, El Salvador; European Foundation Center Philanthropy House, Brussels; CECUT, Tijuana; New Americans Museum, San Diego CA), Side by Side (Universidad Iberoamericana), En mi being eternal (La 77), Mexico; Timeline Project, Chicago; 2012; International Biennial of Banners , Tijuana 2010, International Biennial of Visual Poetry , Mexico 2009; Close UP , Mexico 2007; Domestic Mail , Galerie Nod, Prague 2007; Half Mast, Haydee Rovirosa, NYC 2007, Interregno , Art & Idea, Mexico 2006; Harto Espacio , Montevideo, 2004.
ARTIST STATEMENTS:
My work frequently involves a construction that can be composed of video, photography, painting, sculpture, installation, performance, collage, graphic arts, and social actions. When I develop a project, I explore its components in their symbolic state, their traditional and historical context, as well as the impact they generate socially, politically, economically and spiritually.
Recovery, as a way of reclaiming discarded objects, is a common theme for me. I analyze the passage of time on the speeches; how they can expire or become effective according to opportunity or convenient to a current situation.
I seek to create values and rescue those that contribute to critical and responsible thinking.
– Máximo González, 2017
My plastic work seeks to abolish language and, at the same time, is supported by it. It addresses original thought, not ideas. It overrates symbols and then undervalues them. It sends messages to intuition as well as reason. It tries to observe symbols in space and their interrelation, as well as it investigates the nature of materials and their antecedents or provenance, without forgetting the importance of the title in the work and the historical-cultural context in which it is inserted.
Through my creative writing, as well as my drawings, paintings, performances, photographs, videos and installations, I seek to help people understand why they do what they do, through the analysis and interpretation of our conceptions and their origin, in order to promote critical thinking and the poetic experimentation of the world.
– Ivan Buenader, 2021
RESIDENCY PROJECTS:
UNTITLED (‘TISSUE CULTURE’ ANIMATION #1)
2021, Video Animation, 2 min 25 sec
Marching through the shelf of a library, some decorative objects and other toys, peek into a drawing that absorbs them in a universe of colorless lines, where an indecipherable shape squeezes them to make room for those who continue to arrive. The drawing gradually becomes denser, until at a certain moment it begins to be imperceptibly released: the elements that had entered leave the drawing and, little by little, it becomes a simpler composition, without saturation.
– Artist Statement by Iván Buenader
N8 – CARBONIC INCINERATION 1
2021, Tissue culture oil, ink, acrylic and gesso on pasted street signs, 85 x 60 x 5 cm
[One from series of may works created during thee Residency.]
On the streets of the city of Berlin, street posters are piled up on the walls, one on top of the other, glued together with paste. Some promote a new hamburger, others a musical concert, a home delivery app or an express covid test service. The stacking of posters creates a volume that, with the passing of days, is destined to disappear: a downpour falls on the city and they become so heavy that they bend like a withered flower, or someone tears them off as a souvenir or innocuous form of vandalism, or the city council removes them when it performs its regular cleaning.
In her laboratory, a Polish scientist, under a microscope, places a number of cells on a substance that is used for their proliferation. Cells will begin to reproduce slowly, then quickly, until they meet their limit and begin to shrink. It is difficult to distinguish when or what the maximum point was before beginning their decrease, in search of their own balance.
Hanging on the wall, on the whitened surface of a pile of posters, there is an unclassifiable, carbonic-looking shape that expands on the paper as if it were burning, or perhaps it contracts, as if it were submerging.
– Artist Statement by Iván Buenader
VOLKSPARK
2021, Video Performance, 3 min
“The remains that are hidden and lie buried under the appearance of a hill, as well as the static, immovable, inert sculptures that function as tributes to powerful entities or to people who gave their lives, voluntarily or involuntarily, to defend historical or temporal community values, they play a symbolic game with the living, mobile, restless body, which teaches freedom as it orbits around these monoliths, calling for a re-interpretation of memory.”
– Iván Buenader
Iván Buenader’s video performance, Volkspark, is the latest in a series of impromptu dance performances enacted within the context of every Artist Residency in which he participates. In this case, the work results from his 3-month Residency at MOMENTUM AiR during the summer and autumn of 2021 – a period of cautiously hopeful ‘normality’ in a city still learning to cope with the ongoing aftermath of the pandemic. Buenader is not a dancer. His dance series is not intended as a performance of technical competence, but rather, as his way of experientially engaging with every Residency location by means of mapping the movements of his body onto that space – be it a studio, cityscape, or countryside. The very act of movement through space connotes a freedom of which many were deprived during the long months of pandemic lockdown. While the title of the chosen soundtrack to this performance – “(I just don’t wanna) Miss A Thing” by Kylie Minogue – evokes the thirst for actual experience after months of isolation, coupled with the artist’s journey of discovery through Berlin’s multifaceted cityscape.
In Volkspark (meaning People’s Park in German), Buenader dances through Berlin’s oldest public park: Volkspark Friedrichshain. Dressed in clothes found on the streets – the literal social fabric of Berlin – he moves amidst various monuments inscribed with references to battles, conquests, nations, historical milestones, popular mythologies, and literary characters of children’s fables (the Fountain of Fairy Tales; the Berlin Bear; statues of Frederick the Great, the Javelin Thrower, and Mother and Child; Memorials for German fighters in the Spanish Civil War, and for Polish soldiers and anti-fascist Germans in WWII; and stairs on the hill covering the remains of one of several WWII bunkers and flak towers still inscribed within the fabric of the cityscape).
THE SOWER IN THE COURTYARD OF THE COLUMNS
2021, Wall paint on silk shawl, 85 x 85 cm
This work forms part of Buenader’s ongoing series of paint on textile works. Literally addressing the social fabric, the artist paints abstract alphabets of signs and symbols onto found materials collected in the various cities to which his peripatetic practice leads him. Scarves, blankets, tablecloths, shower curtains, and more found on the street, given by friends, or discovered in flea markets – these relics of the social fabric form the canvases for Buenader’s interventions.