Gina Mier Casa Equis

Gina Mier, Bota, 2019, Casa Equis 

Gina Mier (Honduras, 1993) graduated in visual arts at the National School La Esmeralda. She discovered a habit/interest in manipulating and exaggerating everyday situations taking them to the realm of fantasy. Misrepresentation comes from being born in Honduras under a dramatic political and economic social context. One of the references of her work is coonected to the magic realism. She tries to show the strange as something common, her creative process observes the usual and she exaggerates it till the power of a caricature.

Bobby Cruz Galeria Petrus

Bobby Cruz, serie: Casas Criollas, 2019, Petrus Gallery

Bobby Cruz, painter, sculptor, draftsman and creator of installations. Obtains in 2008 a Bachelor’s Degree in Painting from Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Puerto Rico. During his career as an artist, he has exposed in multiple group exhibits at diverse galleries on the Island and his work has been exposed in contemporary art fairs at United States, among other countries. Had his first solo exhibition in 2009. Cruz brings the painting medium to another level, leaving a mark with his particular style, expressing himself beyond the canvas. He is recognized by his colorful paintings of bicycles and classic cars with linear and protruding strokes of paint. He also works sculpture, always maintaining his discourse by employing objects popular in character that possess collectable potential. The artist reveals his eagerness for the collection of pet objects, transforming them through his work into one more collector’s item. Last year, Cruz received the Beca Lexus for artists.

Shinji Nagabe Galeria Alalimon

Shinji Nagabe, Purification 7 (Ensemble de 7 photographies), 2015, Galería Alalimon

The photographer Shinji Nagabe (Terra Roxa, PR, Brazil, 1975) lives in Madrid.
Japanese-Brazilian Shinji uses his multicultural heritage as the basis for his work, bringing identity and customs to it. His images seem full of fantasy, while at the same time being pervaded by reality, questioning the relationship of humans with society and the environment. Shinji’s work has always been guided by these two cultures and by a mix of reality and fantasy. Trained as a journalist, Shinji Nagabe was the winner of the 2016 Art Photo BCN award and, although he does not work in the field of photojournalism, Shinji makes an intriguing symbiosis between reality and fantasy. His pictures are the place where symbols of African candomble and Brazilian Carnival are combined in a typical Asian formality.

This series of 7 images is located on the banks of the San Francisco river: named according to the patron of the poor, it crosses 5 states in a very arid region of the northeast of Brazil. These photographs evoke the rituals in which the water of the river is used to bless and purify. Flowers represent those used in baptisms, weddings and funerals. The characters wear flowers like masks, like in the carnival; they are here tritons and nymphs, representing beliefs related to nature, the river and his sacred side. But here bouquets are made of plastic flowers and they evoke the disappearance of nature replaced by an industrial and artificial version.

Alexandre Mazza Luciana Caravello

Alexandre Mazza lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Mazza was a bass player and composer for 18 years before dedicating himself to the visual arts. His fascination for optical illusion and his early and continuous interest in light and electricity evolved to the “multiplication of light” series of works. The artist researches a various array of materials combining high and low tech to produce kinetic works of “electric living light”, as he calls them.

The central theme of the works of Alexandre Mazza is the gaze. It is mainly through objects that the artist confronts the viewers with visual games: with what you see and what you think you see, with real and the imagined. His most recent works were presented his fourth solo show, “We are your Light”, at Luciana Caravello Arte Contemporânea exhibition space. The artist presented 15 original works produced this year, including videos and video-installations that enter into dialogue with one another and possess a certain unity, as if they were a single work. They are all based on images of water and waterfalls.

The artist aimed to use the works in this exhibition to draw attention to the miracles that occur around us. “Miracles are not rare. They happen all the time, every second. A constant phenomenon. Miracles should take on a new, less obvious, more important
significance. A continuous waterfall is a miracle. Being alive is a miracle. I could have chosen various examples of miracles but I chose water”, the artist explains.
Trained as a musician, Alexandre Mazza worked for 18 years as a bassist and composer and became interested in light and electricity. Since 2008, he has dedicated himself exclusively to what he calls “multiplication of light”, using various materials, such as mirrors, glass, metal, lamps, acrylic and wood. The works in this exhibition represent a continuation of this research.

Felipe Rivas San Martín Factoria Santa Rosa

Felipe Rivas San Martín, Mujeres Selk’nam, 2016, Factoria de Arte Santa Rosa

Felipe Rivas San Martín is a visual artist and sexual dissident activist. Master in Visual Arts, University of Chile. He currently lives and works in Valencia, Spain, where he pursues a phd in Arts from the UPV, as a fellow of the National Commission of Scientific and Technological Research, CONICYT. It links artistic production and activism with research, writing and curating, in matters relating to image, politics and technology, queer theory, archives, post-feminism, performativity.
It develops an in-disciplinary production relating painting, drawing, performance, video, through the technological image (virtual interfaces, QR codes, facial recognition, etc.).  He has participated in collective art exhibitions in Chile, Argentina, Germany, Spain, Peru, Colombia, United States, Ecuador, Mexico, Switzerland, Uruguay, Serbia, Nicaragua and France.
Between 1998 and 1999 he was a member of MASALEF, a Communist Youth cell that brought together students from the National Institute of Chile. In 2001 participates in the Comité de Izquierda por la Diversidad Sexual, CIDS. The following year, in 2002, he founded together with Pedro Sanzana (another CIDs activist) the Colectivo Universitario de Disidencia Sexual, CUDS, a Latin American group of activism, artistic experimentation and critical reflection. He was director and editor of queer magazine “Torcida” (2005) and Disidenciasexual.cl (2009). He is co-editor (with Francisco Godoy Vega) of the book “Multitud Marica” (2018) and author of the book “Internet, mon amour: infecciones queer/cuir entre digital y material” forthcoming in Écfrasis Ediciones (2019).