ALBARRÁN BOURDAIS | MADRID - Madrid

For its first participation at the fair, Albarrán Bourdais is pleased to announce an engaging presentation by gallery artists Cristina Lucas, Iván Argote, Jose Dávila, Marco A. Castillo, Claudia Comte, Adrien Vescovi, SUPERFLEX and Koo Jeong A, inspired by and assembled around a new carpet installation by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. Evoking both astronomy and speculative fiction, González-Foerster’s carpet installation depicts a representation of a tapestry owned by the artist and which contains dozens of bibliographical references and other personal associations. The new textile work creates a liminal space between the public and the domestic realms, the outer and the inner worlds and the conscious and unconscious. Drawing from shared themes of language and collective memory are works by Spanish artist Cristina Lucas’ "Tufting" series, maps in which bombed cities have been stitched, and the historical altar piece by Christian Boltanski "Monument". On the other hand, works by artists such as Jose Dávila and Marco A. Castillo address the reconfiguration of visual icons: Dávila with a work from the Josef Albers-inspired series "Homage to the square" and Castillo with the geometric poster-like relief "Wakamba nervurado" that evokes the historical Cuban effort for modernist and utopian aesthetics. Albarrán Bourdais’ presentation explores areas of visual and conceptual friction among the various works, manifesting in the form of irony, wonder and even incongruity.

Albarrán Bourdais (https://albarran-bourdais.com) Cristina Lucas (https://albarran-bourdais.com/artist/cristina-lucas/) e-conmotion. Recuerdos colectivos y futuros conscientes 11 September – 25 October Albarrán Bourdais presents “e-conmotion”, an exhibition by Cristina Lucas conceived as an immersive journey through the history of different technological revolutions, from mechanisation to digitalisation, via electricity and computing. Featuring a new body of work created for the exhibition, “e-conmotion” intertwines bodies, machines and the memory of each historical moment, while offering a sensory and critical experience of the present. With a new set of “Compositions”, a sculpture and a video, in “e-conmotion” Lucas reflects on the role of materials and technologies in shaping historical narratives. Revolution is a technical term: it literally means a turn, a rotation. However, every technological advance—the steam engine, the light bulb, data computing, robotics, the internet or artificial intelligence—ultimately profoundly reconfigures biodiversity, social structures, and political and cultural thought, composing an inseparable chain of causes and effects. Lucas delves into the traces of the past to imagine desirable futures. Presented throughout the exhibition are assemblages stemming from her renowned series of “Compositions”, which are the result of the interactions that occur between the materials in each piece. The assemblages emerge from a free exploration of form, in which chemical, cultural, economic, and technological processes act as transformative flows that call for more complex understandings. Incorporating materials that refer to each of the moments of the industrial revolution, from coal and iron to microchips and silicon wafers, Lucas proposes a worldview in which elements are in constant flux and there are no boundaries between technology, humanity, and the environment. The iron used in car manufacturing is the same iron that gives our blood its red colour and the same iron that was formed during the primitive oxygenation of the Earth. Through her works, Lucas invites us to become aware of the interconnection of these flows as the basis for a new balance from which to imagine and build a conscious future. A central work in the exhibition is the video “Chain Reaction Belt”, a hybrid composition of multiple elements that traces how technological milestones expand into other economic, social, political and intellectual spheres. This process unfolds as a continuum, a “timelapse” of the Anthropocene that spans from the steam engine to artificial intelligence and culminates in the image of the desired vision: that of an empowered society that demands balance with the planet, technology and privacy. With “e-conmotion”, Cristina Lucas develops an imaginary through a non-utilitarian and contemplative use of materials linked to technological development, seeking a balance between critical thinking and hope, inviting us to move—all together—towards more conscious and sustainable ways of inhabiting the world.

This summer, Albarrán Bourdais presents "Essay on Permanence", a solo exhibition by José Dávila at its Menorca gallery. For this first collaboration with the gallery, Dávila has conceived a body of work that includes new sculptures and paintings, some made on the island with local materials. Through these pieces, the artist continues his investigation into balance, gravity, structural fragility and the architecture of resistance. Originally trained as an architect, Dávila translates the fundamental principles of drawing and construction into three-dimensional space, highlighting the physical mechanisms that allow objects to sustain themselves and occupy a place in the environment. His interest in megalithic structures – including the Talayotic structures of Menorca – connects his practice with primary gestures of occupation of the territory and observation of the cosmos, underlining an essentially human dimension in the way we relate to matter. The series of sculptures "Fundamental Concern", installed on the ground and first floors, draws from the ancestral act of placing objects, such as a stone, in space. From combinations of apparently contradictory forces, these works construct situations of unstable equilibrium, where gravity, more than an obstacle, becomes the agent that sustains and defines the form. In the words of art historian Sacha Craddock, "Dávila’s works, often evidence of his own action with balance, tension and stress, never hide the mechanism beneath the façade they present", making visible the tension between stability and precariousness, resistance and imminence. In dialogue with traditions such as minimalism and conceptual art, Dávila reinterprets common materials – cement, stone, steel – giving them new meanings through their interaction with space. The use of local materials from Menorca, reinforces this relationship between material, context and memory, and proposes a reflection on the correspondence between physical weight and symbolic weight. "Essay on Permanence" also presents the new series of paintings "Divisions of the Internal Space", displayed throughout the manor house. On raw linen canvases, Dávila frames negatives of primary geometric shapes – circles, squares, triangles – delimited by applications of white paint. The tension between the organicity of the pictorial stroke and the geometric structure poses a meditation on the process of constructing meaning, where repetition, variation and interpretation intersect. The compositions invite us to think about an interior space both physical and metaphorical – that of the complexity of the human mind. This series of mobiles, which Dávila has developed in recent projects such as his exhibition at the Gunma Museum of Modern Art in Japan, offers a reflection on the relativity of perception, gravity and time as sculptural matter. Finally, on the second floor, a suspended installation composed of river stones, a wooden trunk and a painted beam poses a silent choreography of opposing forces. The arrangement of these elements, stretched in the air, suggests a temporality in suspension, a state of latent transformation. Each gesture of positioning re-signifies the object, emphasising the fragility of equilibrium as an expanded metaphor for our relationship with the environment. In parallel to "Essay on Permanence", José Dávila’s work can currently be seen at a major retrospective at Museo de Arte de Zapopán, at Desert X in Coachella and at Solo Sculpture Trail, the sculpture park that Albarrán Bourdais opens in Matarraña on 15 June.