Topografías Urbanas

A new way of drawing the urban universe has been summoned at Fúcares gallery (Almagro) as a meeting of artists whose key can be found in the representation of spaces linked to the city. In this sense, our exhibition intends to articulate different meanings that enable a map of the urban, with its current presence in contemporary art as the starting point. This new way of drawing civilisation means starting off from a real space that aims to identify itself with the new limits exposed. Although the city used to represent a separation from the natural, we now know that in the course of history, there have certainly been places of confluence. Thus, they point towards that ability to inhabit today’s growing big cities.

Neutral spaces like hotel rooms, railway cars and historical spaces contrast with buildings and offices, streets and crossroads in an impossible return to the geography of the uninhabitable. The return to the room or chamber is the first space where limits are a reflection of that which is happening in our inner journey. A memory identified with the passage of time as displayed in the spaces created by Jaime de la Jara or associated to an inverted ideal, as can be read in the platonic chamber of Ángel de la Rubia. In the case of José Guerrero, a snapshot of the interior of a hardware store where we can still anticipate a metaphoric Iron Age. In their approach to civilisation, Bleda and Rosa have verified that the current meaning of symbolic spaces is linked to a certain violence in history.

They are places still preserved, and deprived of their origins, that provide a new sense to the meaning of taking a walk. For although in any image, such as the Cubist photographs by Isidro Blasco, we actually find an enlightening drawing of the city, we are also aware that we have found a construction and a constitution of that which we actually are. In the case of Pablo García’s architecture, in which tracing lines equate to moving about walks around the city, these lines are thresholds giving way to exteriority, like that displayed by Howard Ursuliak, or like those in the sombre buildings by Vincenzo Castella, in which the topographic approach is understood from a metaphoric and transversal meaning. It is the marking of directions in Roberto Infantes’s photographs or, in the conceptual dimension represented by Marco Pires, marking absent spaces linked to a topography to come.

Urban Topographies is the project to trace a map on contemporary art from the space of our gallery in Almagro — a meeting of national and international artists whose keys can be found within the frame of the new and current city.