the street is our gallery

We live in agitated cities —Roberto Arlt would have called them epileptic cities— that overwhelm us. At times it’s because of their strange growth through general plans of housemanization urban planning, sometimes out of habit, sometimes by the way in which the substrate populations overlap each other,as layers of time, as waves of migration, as organized gangs defining their areas of operation in neighborhoods and suburbs. Our territory, we, our cities now, are the post evolution of the modern city invented by the romantic flânerie of the nineteenth century and the futuristic art of the twentieth century —Metropolis, the Paul Citroën collage always comes to mind—, several global wars and postmodern reconstructions, all revolutions, paying attention to phenomena such as gentrification and the nonsense that governs the media world.

Everyone in their home and everyone in our districts are forced to the limit by the city’s demands. We push our apartments as we also push the margins of urban reinvention to a sea of masonry and construction, which are our history and resources, so often stupidly neglected. The painting  of Manolo Mesa and Mohamed L’Ghacham show these scenarios, the worn out spaces for this necessary action, setting the right place or the people who live in them; Sebas Velasco’s work transfers the power and urgency of the act of painting on the street, underlining it’s complaint; On his behalf, Alessandro Etnik’s geometric structures build an abstract vision, an ideal, with simple lines. The four previous artists develop part of their work on the street, and the contrasting element is set by Jessica Hess’ hyperrealism, not involved with walls but transferring onto canvas the beauty of the horror vacui of a total invasion of tags and graffiti that, with hysteria, recall to the deterioration of our cities. TEXT @Ricardo Forriols