Songs of the earth, lines of thought: Julián Burgos, Bilal Chahal, Gregorio Cuartas, Radenko Milak, Ramón Laserna

For Art Rotterdam we propose a selection on five artists whose work represent an outline of contemporary practice, and a cross-section of contemporary thinking through the practices of painting, watercolor and drawing, as assumed by artists of different ages, backgrounds and artistic interests.  

Julián Burgos (Pereira, Colombia, 1976) lived his formative years in Europe, deriving a keen interest in baroque art as a form of turmoil and expression of the living world.  Baroque concepts such as circular movement, inventive deformation and extreme tactility and physical exuberance translate in his work into a highly personal search for discontinuity and change.  His interest in popular culture and digital means also contributes to an attitude that challenges ideas of transcendence, focusing instead on temporality and change. His latest series refers to a recent African experience, thus joining the wild and earthy with the symbolic, the body with the hierarchical order of form, myth and nature.

The recent paintings of Bilal Chahal (Tripoli, Lebanon, 1978) recall the world as a stage, time as a philosophical preoccupation and our existence in the irrecoverable present. “Chronos and Kairos draws from the ancient Greek concepts of time: Chronos, representing chronological, linear time, and Kairos, referring to the opportune moment or the right time. By framing waiting as a duality between these two modes of time. It delves into the tension between the mundane passage of minutes and the profound, often unpredictable moments when waiting culminates in significance. This suggests a philosophical exploration of how waiting can be both a mundane experience of passing time (Chronos) and a transformative experience where the right moment (Kairos) eventually arrives”. Bilal Chahal left Lebanon and found refugee in Curaçao, counting with dutch citizenship, he nows lives and works between Amsterdam and Bogota.

The paintings of Gregorio Cuartas (San Roque, Colombia, 1938), who spent his formative years between monastic life and architecture strive to an uncommon repose and meditative quality that has informed his private life. A French citizen, he works serene compositions associated with renaissance art and architecture, recalling also the landscape of Tuscany, where he has a studio. His work is characterized by the play of light, color and vertical and horizonal planes.  Limiting his outlines with perspectival planes, the line of the horizon, and a sharp definition of form, his ideal refers to the impulse that moves a seed to turn into a tree: a constant search for equilibrium, spiritual perfection and renunciation of superfluous elements.

Radenko Milak (Travnik, Yugoslavia, 1980) is a prolific artist with a multifaceted career. In his recent work, he reflects of the interaction between science, urbanization and technology. His ongoing series of watercolors put us in contact with a history of urbanization, globalization and modernity. As an expert in East European film, and a keen study of disaster in the form of war and natural and manmade disasters, his black and white works on Rio de Janeiro, La Habana, Cuba, New York, Sao Paulo and Delhi, among others, explore the existential issues of modernity, as well as its formal, social and material impact on the environment. These ‘songs to modernity’ explore the aesthetic, political and social impact of ‘living together’ in an isolated, individualistic and repetitive mode, the mass anonymity of urban life versus Exodus, displacement and the myth of a pristine nature.

For Ramón Laserna, lines represent a connection with the history of Latin American abstraction, as well as a physical phenomenon. Drawing and weaving come together in his recent work, an exploration of visual complexity, distortion and chance. His drawings in ink combine algorithms and color to form abstract variations. Totally hand-drawn, the ever-expansive works and his collaboration with Colombian indigenous artisans that weave abstract patterns in caña-flecha, highlight his personal philosophical perspective, where repetition is a form of mantra and meditation.

This assemblage of artists goes from the feeling for the earthly, baroque and physical to the development of personal lines of thought. These songs to the earth, the human and transient also contain those questions about our common future, glimmers of hope and collaboration amid the culture of excess and the technological quagmire of contemporary culture.

Ana Patricia Gómez - Director