Proyecto H presents “Light and Memory” a collective exhibition with artist Pablo Armesto (Schaffhausen, Switzerland, 1970), José Manuel Ballester (Madrid, 1960), and Juan Garaizabal (Madrid, 1971). The exhibition brings together sculptural and photographic work that accounts for certain elements shared by the artists, such as the play of light and shadow in Pablo’s sculptures, the characters or subjects in José Manuel’s photographs, and the filling in the sculptural structures of Juan. Thus, they prioritize the light that radiates from their works, giving rise to a poetics of memory.
Pablo, who experiments with neons, LEDs, and fiber optics, explores the various possibilities that light, its absence, its shadow, and the reproduction of fractals offer as matter. In this way, technology, biology, nature, geometry, and memory intersect in contemporary work. It is thanks to light and its antonym, those geometric figures emerge from the optical fiber to be remembered at a specific moment in which the artist has decided to freeze them.
On the other hand, for a photographer like José Manuel Ballester, light is the main element with which he works. Through the traces that he captures, his camera leaves a record of the remains of the memory of what happened in a specific architectural space; on which we can observe what the subject has left behind, what he did. Ballester encapsulates monumental architectural spaces in isolation, once manipulated to be built and twice manipulated to be captured in his images (digitally), and allows us to rethink the subject or viewer.
Finally, Juan Garaizabal is a versatile inventor, is recognized for his monumental public sculptures: urban memories. For him, the trip has a special character, since it establishes a relationship with the buildings and monuments so that it is possible for him to bring back his historical memory, that which is no longer materially visible until his work comes into play. Recreating structures and illuminating them, he recovers what was lost long ago, reestablishing what, in the words of Barbara Rose, “can now only exist in a fragment of historical memory.” In the same fragmentary sense, Juan’s sculptures invite the viewer to complete the forms of the structures, so that his objective is to integrate the empty spaces and integrate himself with what is absent.
The collective brings together an artistic work whose relationship with space is framed by light, which, because it does not have a defined limit, allows it to be explored from different angles, thus evoking memory. A collective without margins.