Exhibition "Ojos de perro azul", at Galería Nuno Centeno, Porto. October 20 - November 6, 2012
The show consisted in two curtain/fabric pieces (one installed at the entrance of the gallery, in front of the store front-window, and the other installed in the entrance to the gallery office) and a new group of silkscreen prints, all unique copies, all based on details of the cover design of the science fiction story book "Extrapolasis", by Alexander Malec, published in 1967 by Doubleday & Company Inc., New York.
"Extrapolasis #2 (on Stripes), 2012, silkscreen print, unique copy, 62.5 x 93 cm &
"Extrapolasis #1", 2012 & "Extrapolasis #2", 2012, both silkscreen prints on paper, unique copies, 102 x 66.5 cm. each
Ojos de perro azul, Felipe Mujica
For my exhibition at Nuno Centeno I am exhibiting two wall-curtains and a new group of silkscreen prints. These works address two structural and historical periods, which have been the base of my work: avant-garde and neo avant-garde. The title of this exhibition was taken from a short story, by Gabriel García Marquez, written in 1950.
The designs of the “wall curtains” can be simple color and form encounters, or appropriations of drawings made by other artists. In both cases the works directly refer to modernism (and specifically to the history of painting and its expansion into architecture as a socially aware act). The “wall curtains” are flexible in their use. They can work on their own, reorganizing space in search of a new density and circulation; and they can also work in relation to other works, both mine from other artists, in which case they become an exhibition design tool that opens up the work to be used by other artists or curators. Importantly they can function simultaneously in several layers: as fragile and temporary architecture, as exhibition design, as modernism references, as research platforms and also as decorative objects.
For Nuno Centeno I have decided to install 2 curtains, on two opposite sides of the exhibition-space: one at the entrance and one at the door-arch that leads towards the office of the gallery. Each “wall-curtain” addresses its architectural setting in a subtle yet direct way, one becomes a curtain (with an exterior and interior view) and the other an entrance-divider.
The silkscreen prints are a new group of works based on the cover design of a science fiction book printed in 1967 titled “Extrapolasis”, by writer Alexander Malec. The cover shows a group of 15 spiral and skewed shapes connected to each other by lines. I have appropriated and isolated 2 of these figures and produced a new group of images that explore different color and formal combinations, producing sometimes clear and simple BW prints and other times more dirty and visually complex overlapping prints. The way these where organized and installed in space was in relation to the two opposite curtains and architectural features of the gallery, creating a reading that has no center yet only different gradations. The show is also divided in two, or like a coin, has two sides, looking towards the entrance of the gallery all prints and the curtain have color, looking towards the office all prints and curtain are in Gray/BW.
This group of prints is part of a lager series of works that are done appropriating mostly design images from sources from the late 50’s to mid 70’s… such as political posters, psychedelic imagery, Japanese graphic design, and book covers of publications ranging from Science Fiction to Mathematics. What unites these images is the historical context of 1969. They also share a universal graphic language, which sometimes overlaps and sometimes borrows from each other: psychedelic images can be seen in Chilean political posters, Op Art like designs can be seen in a Japanese camera add, and so on. In this sense my appropriation and transformation of these images becomes an extension of their own internal appropriations and transformations. My silkscreen prints present new readings of each reference, creating new images in a frozen-like state, in-between an image that wants to become something new and an image that is suspended in its own history.