Salomé del Campo. Nights and Days

Dates: March 18 - August 29, 2021
Curators: Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes / Yolanda Torrubia Fernández
Coordinator: Roxana Gazdzinski
Space: East Cloister 2

Visual studies, which came into their own at the turn of the millennium, have analysed the massive public circulation of images from the perspective of different disciplines. For the time being, painting remains pertinent in the production of cultural meaning, but this medium-at least its most contemporary facet-has lost its preponderant role in the global distribution of representation. This is the context in which Salomé del Campo (Seville, 1961) has pursued her creative career since the second half of the 1980s to the present day. In fact, her pictorial output could be interpreted as an analysis of certain images from different distribution channels of modern-day visuality, such as those related to the everyday, experience or even the history of art itself.

This mid-career survey attempts to reflect the way she works-generally in small series, sometimes consisting of just two pictures-and begins with three monochromes from the 1990s. Grey, red and blue are the tones of the works in the large gallery where they have been assembled. Everything may be rooted in the history of art. The oldest of them, which refers to Piranesi, could have been inspired by grisaille, just as the Demoliciones (Demolitions) series was suggested by the "black and white" mass media. Yet monochromes have their own chapter in the history of abstraction, and Prussian blue was Picasso's colour of choice in his Blue Period.

Defamiliarization and ambivalence, two other defining traits of her pictures, are emphasized at the beginning of the exhibition itinerary with her Canchas (Courts) series, where everything seems completely normal, but that ordinariness is as unsettling as Edward Hopper's paintings. The flipside of normality also appears in the next room, as it does in David Lynch's films. Ronda de noche (The Night Watch) is more than just a modern take on Rembrandt's famous painting; the youths hiding their faces introduce a disquieting element that may represent a departure from the norm

The different galleries are tied together by the works related to the mural La nave (The Warehouse), a project that continues the time-honoured tradition of the picture-within-a-picture in order to, like visual studies, analyse everything we fail to notice at first glance

 

 

ADDITIONAL DOCUMENTATION

[Cataloqgue]

[Leaflet]

[Press Dossier (In Spanish)]

[Photo Album on Flickr]