EN

For its participation at Condo New York 2018, hosted by Alexander and Bonin, Madragoa is delighted to present Draw a Line to Make a Landscape, a group exhibition with works by Adrián Balseca, Sara Chang Yan, and Renato Leotta.

In the cartographic practice, the act of drawing a line marks the passage from the inhabited world to the represented space: it is the beginning of a coexistence between the abstract element and the real landscape, a sort of obligatory equilibrium on which each map is based and the landscape squeezed between a geometric lattice and the necessary reference to the actual world.
How to depict a landscape without losing the possibility of inhabiting it, or without losing the load of meanings that exceeds its manifestation? Through essential signs and gestures, Adrián Balseca, Sara Chang Yan, and Renato Leotta explore and recreate the experience of natural environment.

Through the practice of drawing, Sara Chang Yan charts energies, sensitive and mental elements conveyed by the landscape, translating them into minimal signs that settle on the sheet of paper: dots, lines, geometrical shapes, traced by pencil, ink or watercolour, interact with holes, cuts, and removal of thin layers of paper. In the series An infinite flux of graces I (2017), the support is considered as a field that actively responds to the artist’s interventions and gestures. Hanging from the ceiling, floating in the room, the drawings inhabit the gallery and their presence reshapes the space, acting as dynamic, vibrant entities that can be looked at from both sides and, as the viewer moves or the light changes, they reveal unnoticed details and suggest different perspectives.

Renato Leotta recreates in the exhibition space a rarefied marine landscape using elements that come from the seascape itself. A strip of crystallized sea salt on a blue canvas, obtained by the partial immersion of the fabric in the sea water, traces the line of the horizon. The upper part of the two terracotta sculptures reveal the soft shape of beach dunes, reproducing a portion of shore that functioned as a cast for them. Fragments of shells, sand grains and glass particles, melted during the firing process, still shine on their coarse surfaces. These sculptures are conceived as lids, each one for a different container also made of terracotta in the shape of a vase or a box that encloses a portable landscape. They are equipped with a hole from which you can hear the sound of the sea.

In Adrian Balseca’s black and white film, the line is drawn directly in the landscape, in a rubber plantation in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In the forest, the workers pierce the bark of the trees, from which the white resin slowly drips, conveying the impression of a wounded landscape, while the latex collecting vessels have taken the shape of a hand, resembling a glove. The Skin of Labour (2016) focuses on the values that underlie human exploitation of nature, and reflects upon the impact of the technification of labour.