In the Heart of the Beholder
In Collaboration with Beta Gallery
361 Main Street, Kentlands, Gaithersburg, Maryland, 20878 USA
June 17 - August 13, 2022
Artists
In the Heart of the Beholder
The portrait and life are inextricably linked and help to reflect a present or past time.
During the Renaissance, the skill of the artist and the success of his portraits depended on his ability to see the depths of the subject to be portrayed. Not surprisingly, great patrons commissioned his portraits to remain in posterity.
The face and the different approaches to portraiture were seen as an expression of the soul and emotions, a sample of what we do not reveal and what we often do not dare to show.
"In the Heart of the Beholder" brings together 10 contemporary artists who take us to the immense possibilities that the portrait offers. Painting on canvas, photography, sculpture, and even stencil are placed at the mercy of creation, beauty, and the heart of the observer.
Pigments used in the Renaissance, metal printing, photo performance, oil, and spray portray emotions, poetic intensity, and beauty from the contemporary.
As HG Wells said, "Beauty is in the heart of the beholder". And to perceive and be a spectator, you have to observe. Just as the Greeks did and as was done during the Renaissance, you have to take time and observe. And It is precisely that observer who will complete the experience and define beauty, always subjective and particular.
These artists confirm that when talking about image and portrait, beauty, more than in the eye, is in the emotions and drives caused in the viewer.
Cecilia Paredes explores identity through ethereal “photo-performances” in which she camouflages her body against beautifully patterned backgrounds and constructs her own self in relation to the world.
Salustiano shares the emotions of his characters through expressive, intense, sublime, and provocative traits.
Ugalde shows us with virtuosity a display of imagination united with grace, to reinterpret the great masters with a melancholic and iconic work -almost an aesthetic performance of the past in these constructions or deconstructions of image and beauty.
Natalia Revilla in an intimate portrait fuses women with the landscape and reminds us of the importance of being connected with nature.
Through an intergenerational and historical vision, Ana De Orbegoso, Muriel Hasbun, and Avelino Sala open questions about identity, place, individual and collective memory.
Hasbun does so by building their homeland or diaspora homeland with images that integrate past and present.
De Orbegoso analyzes the different modalities of the portrait and reviews its historical relevance through the use of the Huaco Mochica, used to represent the face in ancient Peru.
Sala appeals to the Lacanian conception of the "I" by presenting two images faced with current disasters in front of images extracted from Goya's engravings. Emphasizing that identity and conflict are a space for dissidence and visual confrontation that lead us to understand the local world as a great timeless reflection.
Walterio Iraheta playfully recreates the image taken from second-hand objects coated with graphite, forming with it a kind of anti-image, a pure object that he reproduces in paintings and immuted photographs in versions of the great masterpieces.
ERRE and DJLU use street art and image as referents for transformation and social denunciation. Erre does it with associations with punk, rock, and youthful spirit. While DJLU uses overtly political pictograms, inter-related to the game and the anti-war discourse of his work.
"In the Heart of the Beholder” is the invitation of 10 artists to many interpretations, present and past, and to a common goal: to share sensations in a room where emotion is portrayed and through it the beauty of their characters experienced by their observer.
Gabriela Rosso