The spider web of history 

La Balsa Arte proposes for its stand in Art Paris Art Fair a show by three artists whose different approaches deal the feminist politics of sex, with the fleeting images of a pre-historic landscape, and with the possibilities of failure in science vis a vis the creation of possible new world orders. The compound production of Maite Ibarreche, Juan Osorno and Miguel Cárdenas constitutes a unified and diverse theater of common references and values that grants their endeavour complexity and a cross-system of symbolic communication related to different notions of ‘the real’.    

Maite Ibarreche’s work deals with feminine eroticism derived from the Japanese shunga tradition that existed for more than 300 years.  Working with diverse references, her delicate drawings and collages refer to a tradition sexual naturalism that draws inspiration from diverse sources such as feminine magazines, mass-produced pornography and, of course, the cultured oriental prints that celebrate sexual pleasure in all its forms. While, within Japan, shunga remains an influence on popular art forms such as manga and tattoo art, Ibarreche steps forward in taking a feminist political stand, making womanhood central to her images, reinstating a fresh departure from male-oriented dogmatic repression of feminine sexuality: light and airy, forceful and radical at once.  

One of Miguel Cardenas’ concerns relates to the notion of a pre-historic landscape; metaphorically, in his painting he oscillates between a ‘pre-history’ of contemporary art practice symbolized by images borrowed from the Douanier Rousseau’s primitive world, a frequent reference, and ‘a-world-as-beginning’ dreamscapes where diverse organisms populate a mythical world, organic and mineral at once.   Cardenas’ playful and enigmatic works are at ease with contemporary concerns as well as with paleontology, (inspiration in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, or the Virgin of Willemsdorf), and a subtle strain of modern art, as in Klee, Kandisky and Miró. 

 Juan Osorno continues his exploration of the relation between man and science, or between the weight of belief and myth in human and scientific progress. We can think about man’s continuous striving to create ‘motifs of belief’ within a society of controlled choices. His apparent interest in the ‘real’, which permeates contemporary discourse, (as in real news, real art, real experience) gives way to a consideration of remote events, of strange phenomenon that serve as the necessary postulates for the production of our common referents. His images institute, in the name of the ‘real’, a relentless questioning of the symbolizing power of stories that make us believe in the power of a man-world communication that weaves ‘the spider web of our history’