Renato Osoy

Exhibitions: Galería EXTRA (2016-2019)

Co-curator of 22 exhibitions in the gallery’s main venue and co-curator of 21 exhibitions in the gallery’s Project Room. Selected exhibitions:

Volatilidad, Permanencia (2019)
Alejandro Medina, Fredy Rangel, José Wolff

For this exhibition, Alejandro Medina, Fredy Rangel and José Wolff each show us an investigative approach on their findings on essence and matter about what interests them, or rather, what intrigues them in the plane of perceptions. Although the concepts, objects and images that these artists show us remain, we find that there is a poetic volatility in the selection of materials and the themes in which each of them separately incurs. We see in their artistic doings a permanent impermanence of a constant search for essences and senses, and for an investigative endeavor of inexhaustible character on matter and its relation of fidelity to the expression of their creations.

According to Blanca Solares, “Bachelard has not only founded an analysis of the poetic imaginary of the elements, a material investigation; instead, he has discovered for us the morphology of creative imagination in its link with the vital passage of man.” These artists, like Bachelard, present to us artistic objects that touch the essence of what is vital, the material preocuppation of spirit in nature and in humanity. Solares later adds that, “however, images are not only accumulated in memory in an anarchic, passive way; rather, they transform us, they inhabit us and they orient us or lead us astray. To interiorize, evaluate, and comprehend the life of images – ‘to treat the impossible as though it were possible’ (Goethe) – is an ethical duty and a responsibility.” These artists challenge us as an audience to go one step further from what we perceive at first sight.

Alejandro Medina, in his obstinate investigation, creates an archeology of structures and of forms in nature, thus, he represents them in materials that emulate the permanence of crystallization. They are volatile in the process of their transformation: glass, plaster and photography. In his studies on psychology, Fredy Rangel has found, through projective techniques and clinical observation of the Rorschach test, a window to the inconscious of the subjects he researches. The intuition that stems from these findings has led him to create his own imaginary of “Rorschachian” abstractions, images that he has permanently embedded into steel sheets through a volatile process of ephemeral carving using fire. José Wolff, in his paintings and video installations, captures images that vanish. What disappears is not the material, but the essential and abstract of its being: time, memory, the past. Something is covered, something remains and something disappears; what is concrete volatilizes, now into ephemeral forms.

The treatment and the approach that each artist has given to the shapes and forms in their representations is what leads us to perceive reality in a different state of consciousness. This is how Deleuze and Guattari refer to it while describing the immanent plane of figurations: “The transcendence that is projected on the plane of immanence paves it or populates it with Figures. It is a wisdom or a religion–it does not much matter which. It is only from this point of view that Chinese hexagrams, Hindu mandalas, Jewish sephiroth, Islamic ‘imaginals,’ and Christian icons can be considered together: thinking through figures.” The figures have become incarnate in the forms, the textures speak not only about the surfaces they create, but about what constitutes them in their essence.

Renato Osoy

Espacio habitado (2019)
Norman Morales

"Man is, until the end, a self-plastic animal, with some insistence he can become almost everything he imagines."
— Peter Sloterdijk 

Every inhabited space is a politicized space, it is a space of resistance of those who inhabit it and those who facilitate it. The person, or rather what embodies the subject that inhabits the living space, is also what agency seeks to determine the use and management of such a site. Who inhabits it, is who ultimately politicizes it. The state of inhabiting is always determined by something alive that denotes the presence in it.

For Sloterdijk, inhabited space is a specific and clearly politicized space: “The design of spaces is related, like architecture, to the terrible circumstance that we belong permanently or occasionally to an environment formed from beginning to end by men. These arts, design and architecture, explain the stay of men in places that offer the help of facilities that are not, for their consumers, anything other than proposals for enslavement to the established situation. Through them, living or being-at-home is interpreted as voluntary submission to the established environment.”

In the work of Norman Morales, geometric strokes are drawn, geographical destinations are intuited, architectural reliefs are raised in the landscape, we see walls that collapse and walls that detach infinitely. Morales erects towers without windows and stairs that go nowhere in his sculptural prototypes. The artist suggests us to follow paths that are drawn in the plane of the impossible, of the intangible, he invites us to introduce ourselves in an alternative plane to reality, that plane that is nothing more than the architecture of his imagination.

In this exhibition, Morales has designed and installed the pieces in a way in which we are unable to get rid of his contemporary perception of a modern idealism. In his pieces he represents an intimate world as the detail of a room or a door that takes us to a room, but at the same time shows us spaces for collective use and mass transition where the corporeal multiplicity of a mediated society lives. His materialized vision shows us a micro and a macro of the inescapable relationship between the animal-human and the artificial nature of the built space.

Renato Osoy

Tiempo, espacio (2019)
Ana Werren, Margarita Figueroa, Nathalie Béard

“The poet - the contemporary - must have his eyes fixed on his time. What did you see in your time? I would like to propose a second definition of contemporaneity to this point: contemporary is one who has a fixed look in his time, to perceive the lights, if not the darkness. All times are, for those who carry out contemporaneity, dark."
— Giorgio Agamben, What is Contemporary?

Both the appropriation of space, and the conception of time, are the agreements that refer to the relational identity to the body. However, there is no time, no space, only chaos. In our need to give ourselves sense in the world in the face of the horror of emptiness, we try to contain and define our body in prefabricated frames of temporality and spatiality. The artist is concerned with research, appropriation and the claim of spatial territory and the temporal dimension as frames of artistic creation, and as infinite starting points towards the imagination.

In their works, these artists mutate the static of the landscape and the permanent of the everyday into unexpected forms of representation. It is the journey through memory that intrigues Ana Werren and leads her to find, in found objects, geomorphic forms that evoke a nostalgic landscape, data permeated by the memories of her subconscious. Ana tells us: “On the other hand, to abstract the landscapes of the postage stamps from my father's collection, landscapes specifically from Switzerland, another part that is part of my definition as a person. For more information on how to establish social networks, I sought to rediscover through them. I have more of an emotional relationship with the abstract landscapes of the keys than with the landscapes, a little more literal of the stamps".

Nathalie Beard incessantly investigates the passage of time and the traces of her shadow, she documents and captures the subtlety of the shadow traces as evidence of something that is, of something that was. For Nathalie: "To explore the different mediums that reflect time, like the shadows of the passage of time, an hourglass, a clock, a digital clock ... and also explore this same notion in different media such as painting, photography, installation ... it's really an investigation and a search for how to make abstractions of time.”

As a witness of a space that has been spoken, in her series "I have not learned to say", Margarita Figueroa records on the paper the moments lived in the place of transitory residence. She invites us to imagine with her impressions how the time lived since impermanence would be. In the day-to-day story, Margarita realizes what is captivated: "Thus, I had not only got used to the routines of getting up in one way, feeding my cat in a certain way, smells, window views, spatial sensations, but also to favorite places like a place to have a coffee, a beer, finding a curious garment in the thrift shop, look for new glasses, etc. After getting used to seeing the empty spaces, imagining where I would put my furniture, from where sunlight will enter, etc.”

It is the way in which we frame time and distance, the journey through a space between transits and interruptions, coincidences and anachronisms, or perhaps an encounter with the present in time, in a particular place, which leads to these artists to invite us to take a slow look to find in their works the singular within the common. For them, art becomes a perceptual framework of inexhaustible possibilities.

Renato Osoy

K’o q’iij ne t’i’lto’ ja juyu’ t’aq’aaj (2019)
Manuel Chavajay

There are Days that Mountains and Volcanoes Approach

Manuel Chavajay is his own landscape, he is both the dream of the Atitlán landscape, as the landscape is the dream of himself. The landscape is immanent, the landscape is inexhaustible and extends permanently in the impermanence of its infinite transformation.

From his artistic sensibility, Chavajay determines the landscape with his eyes and his history; it abstracts the ancient pigment of the mountains, of the water, of the air and of the clouds, and turns it into paint and form. The light is indelible both during the night and during the day, and this is evidenced in the volumes of his representations. He creates a new territory of perception where we no longer only see the landscape, but the essence of his gaze and his eternal relationship with his surroundings.

K’o q’iij ne t’i’lto ’ja juyu’ t’aq’aaj
There are Days that Mountains and Volcanoes Approach
Ja juyu ’t’aq’aaj nu kaxri toq k’o jaab’
Mountains and volcanoes approach when they rain
Ja juyu ’t’aq’aaj nu kaxri toq k’o q’iij
The mountains and volcanoes move away with the sun
Ja juyu ’t’aq’aaj nu kaxri toq k’o muqulii’
Mountains and volcanoes approach when it is cloudy
Ja juyu ’t’aq’aaj nu kaxri toq k’o xocomeel’
The mountains and volcanoes move away when there is southern air
Ja juyu ’t’aq’aaj nu kaxri toq k’o mayuul’
Mountains and volcanoes approach when there is fog
Ja juyu ’t’aq’aaj nu kaxri toq k’o iq’
The mountains and volcanoes move away when there is Moon
Ja juyu ’t’aq’aaj nu kaxri toq saqarii
The mountains and volcanoes are approaching when the sun rises
Ja juyu ’t’aq’aaj nu kaxri toq qa q’iij
The mountains and volcanoes are approaching when the sun rises
Ja juyu ’t’aq’aaj nu kaxri toq pank’a q’iij
The mountains and volcanoes move away when the afternoon comes
Ja juyu ’t’aq’aaj nu kaxri toq nooq aq’a
The mountains and volcanoes approach when it's noon
Ja juyu ’t’aq’aaj nu kaxri toq k’o ik’
The mountains and volcanoes move away when night falls
Ja juyu ’t’aq’aaj nu kaxri toq k’o k’atiik
The mountains and volcanoes change color when there is air from the north
Ja juyu ’t’aq’aaj k’o q’iij toq noq’ii k’olii nb’iij.
Mountains and volcanoes change when they catch fire
there are days that mountains and volcanoes cry and talk to us
When it rains, the mountains and volcanoes move away
When the air clears, the mountains and volcanoes approach
It is unreal that mountains and volcanoes approach or move away
This happens because time is changing
Because the light is changing from moment to moment
Here I leave the time embodied in these surfaces

Extensión visual (2018)
Andrés Vargas, Kevin Frank

Des-Dibujando (2018)
Alejandro Medina, Alejandro Paz, Camila Fernández, Erick Menchú, Fredy Rangel, Gabriel Rodríguez, Gabriela Novoa, José Wolff, Josué Romero, Kevin Frank, Luiso Ponce, Manuel Chavajay, Margarita Figueroa, María Fernanda Carlos, Mario Alberto López, Mario Santizo, Marlov Barrios, Mauricio Contreras, Norman Morales, Pablo López, Patricio Majano, Sandra Monterroso, Sergio Valencia, Sofía Véliz, Ronald Morán, tepeu choc, Yavheni de León

Ru mujaal’ Ya’ (2018)
In collaboration with Museo de Arte Moderno, Guatemala City
Manuel Chavajay

The reflection speaks to us.
Our wise grandparents and grandmothers visualize,
that our life is like walking on “the lake”,
we have to be careful in drowning or being drowned.
They build wars, fight for land, kill for money,
We have to keep in mind that here we are only passengers.
Let's respect our Mother Earth.

This exhibition compiles very recent series and previously unseen work by artist Manuel Chavajay. The artist uses an inexhaustible repertoire of artistic strategies to construct the representations that narrate his abstractions; drawings in watercolor, acrylics and oils, video-performances and sculptural objects. In this exhibition the artist takes us once again for a mystical journey of the everyday landscape that surrounds him; "the lake". His environment and its contour, is for Chavajay a universe inside and outside itself, it is the infinite source that feeds his imagination.

To be able to get closer to the work of this artist, we must surpass the surface of the design, we must approach its conception or connect to its worldview. For Manuel, the people, the landscape, their intensities and their relationships with the world come from an ancient narrative that explains the origin of things. For example, in his series "The Disappeared”, the artist places us in time through a representation of the local landscape where the main characters are absent and at the same time present. It is not necessarily the chronological time that manifests us, but being in the time in Lake Atitlán. For Chavajay, time is not history, but a recurring and constant present, what was, will always be.

Manuel abstracts the significant and emotional essence of the color of the forms he observes and appropriates. Then he synthesizes it by pouring the pigmented liquid on the work surface, gives it shape again, generating new intensities, textures and meanings. Starting from abstraction to representation, what we see in his work is a process of transformation. The artist trans-forms what was in what is no longer, what we see materialized now is "the other."

Renato Osoy

Corpóreo, Extendible (2018)
Ana Werren

(What is corporeal?) What extends? Reference is made to an interpretation in the same way that a reference is interpreted. The body is taken as a starting point and passes from one hand to another. The letters are baroque and cold, instead, the living line is spinning. What happens without spreading? Do you want me to turn it to see your back? And is it not with the look that the structure is sustained? I stop and the body listens. Mirror polyps are broken until a language is created. The message is made from where the voice comes from. Just close your eyes and wait for the image. It gives extension to the voices, takes advantage of the vibrations, makes the silence accompany the movement in a disorderly way. I stop and the body listens, grinds sounds. Try to exalt and hinder, stop the sensibilities that pass, that travel the space that Ana Werren dislocates in images to empty it and make it penetrable. She drinks the line. She takes her hand to the abyss and measures are taken where the will never ceases to reproduce. If he calls he finds it between his lips. If he inhabits it, he exploits it. The fruit of a voice falls and the fossils. For us there are only stones where the breath slips. He can't find his voice without tripping. There is no escape for escaping.

Camila Fernández

Pintura Actual: Visiones Contemporáneas (2018)
Amber Rose, Camila Fernández, Gabriela Novoa, Gerardo Gómez, José Wolff, Roberto Carter, Yavheni de León

For this collective exhibition on contemporary painting, Galería Extra has invited a group of emerging young artists from the Central American region to exhibit their particular artistic visions through painting. Artists from Guatemala, Costa Rica and El Salvador participate; Gabriela Novoa, Gerardo Gómez, Amber Rose, Yavheni de León, José Wolff, Camila Fernández and Roberto Carter.

We find that in the artistic activity and in the new contemporary practices of the region, painting both on the frame or as a performative gesture is having a rebound among avant-garde artistic circles. In the case of this exhibition, we are particularly committed to showing a variety of aesthetic approaches regarding the ‘traditional’ means of painting the fabric on a frame.

In the search for new representations, the artists present are inclined towards a variety of ways and forms of expressing their concerns and research through the design and content of their paintings. Some point to an expressive figurativism representing fantastic and erotic situations on real scenarios; the body, landscapes and urban environments, others purely reflect an emotional existentialism using the intensity of color through abstract compositions that relate to personal perceptions about their emotional relationship with the environment.

As a gallery and as a curatorial project, we are intrigued and anxious to investigate and show what happens in our immediate artistic context. At the same time, we yearn to open a window to the world of how this local activity relates to the international production of such means. We want to find out what “that” is that artists want to frame, compose or articulate within the framework of their creations today. We refer to what the painter Paul McCarthy mentions as: "That which is associated with the construction of a place, the setting, an existence, an arrangement, the substitutes, the need and the absurd," within the framework of artistic creation.

In a first attempt to exhibit different contemporary artistic visions, this exhibition seeks to open a conversation space to the re-emergence of current painting in the context of the Isthmus region. Although on this occasion we have focused more precisely on the formal aspects of the painting medium and the format of the 'painting' specifically, we have not limited ourselves in the curation of the discourses and the contents treated within the individual proposals, we have left to the artists complete freedom for the development of their themes and their research in their respective representations.

Amplitud (2018)
Gabriel Rodríguez Pellecer

"For the moment, let's realize that all knowledge of the intimacy of things is immediately a poem."
Gaston Bachelard

The amplitude of the horizon extends, prolongs, intensifies, it is a porous line, a border between what was and what will be. For the artist the horizon is wide, infinite. Looking to bring our sensitivity towards the amplitude of the impossible, the artist suggests that drawing a horizon is a poetic gesture that only exists in the extension of the imagination. For this sensitive subject, to define the horizon is to go beyond sight, it is to transcend the gaze, it is an attempt to conceptualize and imagine the limits of the ethereal through the visual.

Gabriel Rodríguez's work evokes questions while challenging us as spectators to make the impossible gesture of embracing or possessing the intangible; the air, the horizon, the sun, a cloud. The horizon is always memory and is constantly regenerated in the present as an illusion, as a gesture of the imagination. Rodríguez himself tells us: “Memory is something that immanently forces us to remember. An event that surprises us and is immediately recorded without asking our 'reason' if we want to consider it.”

On a table we see a path drawn, it is the memory of the present and the present in memory, it is a composition of gestures represented by drawing; drawing by blowing, drawing by cutting, drawing by scraping, drawing by walking. Gabriel starts from reminiscence as a trigger for the metaphorical production of his work, he tells us: “But the remnants of this interest for volcanoes remained; press clippings, some sheets, stones collected in ascents to the volcano and two boxes with volcanic ash from 1998."

For this artist the sun is no longer just a luminous star that illuminates the day to day, but rather a brush of light that paints and un-paints the paper, which draws and de-draws what was not in what is. From inside Gabriel shows us that it is his particular sensitivity and connection to external things that moves him, what inspires him, which pushes him to create: “My nervous system is telepathically connected with the outside,” he tells us. "Amplitude" is a personal synthesis of the artist, it is a sample that brings us closer to a collection of intimacies represented in the context of exteriority.

FEMME (2017)
Ana Werren, Camila Fernández, Gabriela Novoa, Inés Verdugo, Nathalie Béard, Sofía Véliz

It is not that feminine skin possesses whiteness, rather it is spoken of the skin of femininity as the skin of transparency.

It is the skin that allows to see it outside
and also the movement that turns the skin
or a fruit that is split from the inside.

It is a skin that lets itself be used by both men and women.

Here today,
this is the transparency of the veil with which we cover our holes.
These are the ways I have to touch you,
these are the ways I have to approach,
with the flow of flesh, between turbulence.

When, at the foot of the letter, the letter takes shape, when the cold word reveals its refuge, it is when the letter is incorporated and allowed to rub with the tongue.

Sofía Véliz illuminates the edges and probes the chasm with body. The letter becomes table like a horizon that supports and protects.
With Gabriela Novoa, the signs that form the body are exposed, and the passage of silence is creased.
This is the rite of the strokes as organs, these are the waves of the wrists.
Inés Verdugo makes of the movement of the curve, the cure, what is repeated and, if read, it is not contained.
In the escape of the resting body, I (Camila Fernández) only desire the touch of the beast in context.
Water and cliffs, Ana Werren is a mountain where the flow runs after the rain, the silence that passes and furrows.
For flows to be born, to be patiently knotted, Nathalie Béard weaves transparency and entertains time.

Here the flesh rests and weighs
we lick life where it is torn.
It is fluid and tissue at the same time.
It will moisten and come out of the fingers.
It seems that what is decomposing howls.

It can approach you from everywhere, look at you from all perspectives
It is not dark, it is transparent.

"Open your mouth - wait for the sprout of the ivy - breathe because the earth is moistened - open your mouth and swallow the seed."

Camila Fernández

Colectiva 260417 (2017)
AKA Mathias Jaspersson, Ana Werren, Andrés Vargas, Gabriel Rodríguez Pellecer, Matthew May, Norman Morales

The possibility for art to build textures and that through the construction of images we can amalgamate ideas that are constituted as artistic manifestations. Due to that, human beings are made up of layers, stories, tunics, fibers, energies and potentials. In this construction there is a whole aesthetic that exceeds the intrinsic possibilities of art.

Thus, Andrés Vargas explores the ideas of progress from urban textures; Ana Werren from intimacy resorts to the body and its dermal layers, to interiorization through a game of exteriorization, in which she reveals the searches, the conflicts and the confrontation with the internal ghosts that govern us.

In the process of building ideas we find Matthew May, who explores the robes of history, of his own history and the historical memory that build him. New textures are seen as the energy that we impregnate in gestures. The power of our gaze, that subtle gesture that materializes on a sheet of paper and that is made visible through the intervention of pigment on the covers of art history books as reflected by the works of Gabriel Rodríguez.

The intervention of man is given from the tiny thing that a gesture can suggest, or rather, as Norman Morales does when appropriating the designs of nature and the intervention of man to create an infinite set of juxtapositions. And thus, we reach the fibers, optical fibers of a.k.a. Mathias Jaspersson, who registers in the images that go (because the incorporation of images never stops) overlapping until joining his / our imaginary.

Like such, these artists lead us to question what are the textures of the images with which each of us coexist.

Juan Pablo González