Eugenio Merino & Avelino Sala

Eugenio Merino's works are balanced between beliefs and disbelief, paradoxes and logic, taste and bad taste, respect and offense. The artist often assumes a cynical role and reveals uncomfortable views of contemporary societies. Throughout his career, Merino has demonstrated the ability to establish a transdisciplinary work, capable of merging different media such as neorealist sculpture, paintings, drawings or installations. He finds inspiration in a popular imaginary and in the media that he combines with dialectical, metaphorical and metonymic means to assemble his works of art. The opposition of different realities, as well as disparate references and symbols, also generate different possible ways of reading his artistic production. Elements from 21st century iconography and cultural stereotypes that have shaped Western thought can be found in his works of art with an added sense of acid irony and discursive sarcasm.

The aesthetic —that also have a strong ethical— raised by Avelino Sala throughout his career articulate a discourse certainly personal, coherent, and yet complex in their readings and their looks. The diversity of mechanisms employed and expressive languages, which include among others the video, sculpture, photography, neon, drawing or plural world of objects, keeps his (coherent) idea of art but at the same time complex on the diversity of views.

Doormats

FELPUDOS is a reflection on the misogyny that prevails in the history of humanity and culture.

A cleaning exercise to reflect on a problem that remains current in a global context.

Through the derogatory phrases against women of great thinkers on mats, we are able to wipe our feet on them and leave them behind.

A review of the history of thought and philosophy in a hegemonic-deconstructive key.

"We will step on your ideas with such force that we will crush them; before we will fill our shoes with shit, mud, stones and we will pass over our dead and with her blood on our soles we will crush you. Of your archaic thought there will be only a stain ”. Regina Jose Galindo

Felpudos

Doormats printed with macho phrases by philosophers, scientists and intellectuals, selected from the book The Artithmetic of Patriarchy jointly by the artists and the author Yadira Calvo.

In the contemporary world, any object can almost, without realizing it, represent a real political statement and in this case, a doormat tells us so.

The mat is placed on the floor and is used to clean our feet when entering the space of others.

Eugenio Merino and Avelino Sala use the mat as a canvas; "as a place where through words they expand messages, in this case, popular phrases written or declared throughout history by philosophers or scientists. Characters very important in the history of humanity that they built, in the same way that language protected structures of thought in which to strengthen the foundations of an innate chaos that through ideologies they wanted to order. In all these sentences the woman is humiliated or relegated to an absolutely perverse role affirming their lack of the basic values that those same men were using to set their idea of the world in motion." Rafa Doctor

A great task of the present is to erase them and for this reason it is necessary to step on them as this action invites us. “Step physically and symbolically on what is imposed to take cleaner steps in the construction of a new world, but, furthermore, in this step, it is necessary for us to be the ones who propose it from our inherited position of being able to get down to the ground of what is objectively just”. Rafa Doctor

Felpudos, 2020 Phrases printed on coconut mats 115 x 70 cm Editions of 2+2 P.A