A BREAK FROM THE WORLD

Swollen with information, objects, images, objects, and anything susceptible of becoming merchandise, silence appears as refuge. La Balsa Arte gathers Bilal Chahal, Juliana Correa, Gregorio Cuartas and Radenko Milak, a selection of artists close to the gallery, who offer with their work a necessary rest from this new wearing world.

Gregorio Cuartas (Colombia, 1938) knows silence well. Borned and raised in the rurality of San Roque, a Colombian village surrounded by mountains. He also spent five years in the monastery Sainte Marie de la Pierre-qui-Vire preparing to become a monk, idea he discarded just before taking investitures. These moments of silence, and somehow isolation, are shown in the painted chapels in the middle of nowhere horizons, where symmetry, simplification, horizontality and soft colors invite to be in a fixed time while looking at the painting, and after, when we revisit the memory of it.

After several years working in fashion, Juliana Correa (Colombia, 1967) became aware of the high enviromental cost of massive consumption. Observing the piles of trash resulting after the short span of interest in merchandise intems ends, she found enviromental issues being a material manifestation of social wounds such as giving more importance to individual power over collective wellbeing, or the disconection between necessity and desire. After collecting news, soundscapes, textiles scarapes and stories of silenced communities, she constructs pieces in layers with signes, stiches, inks, natural fabrics and threads, where this imposed or pretended silences can be transformed into reparing ones.

In ‘Chronos & Kairos’ series, Bilal Chahal (Lebanon, 1978), as an attentive observant of human emotions, paints a set of chairs and stairs exposing the measurable time of the clock, Chronos, and the time of Kairos, where nothing occurs before it is mean to happen, both demanding to look for the balance amongst patience and action.

Painting and drawing archive images from films, media and documentary photography with black watercolor, Radenko Milak (Yugoslavia, 1980) observes the constant construction of humanity, offering a curated selection of images that, in its sum, may warn us about likely to be repeated past patterns. With a cinematographic eye, Radenko Milak shares a series of nocturnal distant glances to the silent life inside apartment buildings in busy cities like New York.

Using different techniques and a particular direction of each gaze, this selection of artists gives us a refuge to pause and remember a slower pace.