Chervin / Gill / Stupía
Caprichos y Misterios
May 15 to June 26, 2018
Curatorial text
For Picasso, engraving was, among other things, a way to calm his nerves, to experiment, to fight against the ease of drawing. And also, an unconscious diary of emotions. This is, at least, what Brigitte Baer, author of the catalog raisonné of the artist’s graphic work, explains. It was always said that the Spanish artist’s relationship with engraving was intense and passionate.
In this exhibition in which we will exhibit graphic work by Catalina Chervin, Marisa Gill and Eduardo Stupía, and which we will call “Caprichos y Misterios,” we want to put the focus precisely on “Graphic Work” as a traditional but absolutely contemporary discipline within the visual arts.
Over the years, in conversations with many artists, this work always appears, whether engraving, lithography or its other variants, as something that “they have to do” or that they “already did” or are going to do again for a while. lapse of time, as if it were a process that almost capriciously has to be gone through at some point in the artist’s career.
I can imagine that the physical action of working with an instrument, on whatever support, generates in the artist something that cannot be easily realized with words, something linked to a discharge, something to which one always wants to return. although it seems like a whim.
When the artist finishes his intervention on the support and until the printing is finished, there is a window of time, during which something very similar happens to what happened to us in the past when we had a roll of photos developed and we had to wait until the next day, in the best of cases, to see the result. That wait, expectation or mystery of what the final result will be like, I understand, also generates the adrenaline that induces and stimulates us to continue recording.
Among the works on display by Catalina Chervín there are 4 works that belong to a box-portfolio called CANTO, included in various collections, such as those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY and The Jewish Museum, NY, among others. The master printer of this magnificent series of Cantos was Lothar Osterburg.
Marisa Gill shows a series of lithographs and chin colé, where the line alternates between a leading role and a secondary, but no less fundamental, role. Gill works chin colé in a unique way, so much so that her monotypes take on sculptural forms. The artist carried out her work with Matías Amici at the Litográfico Magma studio in Buenos Aires.
The Danish master printer Dan Benveniste was the one who worked together with Eduardo Stupía, during 2013 in Madrid, in the creation of this series of monotypes that we present today at OTTO Galería. In these works by Stupía, a broad idea or concept is evident, applicable to graphic work: the idea of artifice and invented visible signs combined with something hidden that always evades.
In an interview with Dan Benveniste for the newspaper La Nueva España, he was asked how engraving was explained in the technological present, that is, why it continues to exist. To which he replied: Because for the artist it is like an exercise, due to the need to divide his idea into layers of information. It’s like a brain scan. He has to be able to communicate through me.
Picasso produced more than 2,000 works with different graphic techniques almost until the end of his days, which is why he can be considered one of the most prolific engraving artists in history. He clearly had an urgent need to continue recording
Eugenio Ottolenghi
April, 2018
