Pepo Hernando – La Vanguardia – Juan Bufill Read More »
The artist Gonzalo Elvira (Patagonia, Argentina, 1971) has been awarded the Ciutat de Palma Antoni Gelabert Prize for Visual Arts 2020 for his installation Dreams. Previous recipients of this award include artists such as Núria Güell or Carles Congost. At RocioSantaCruz, we celebrate with emotion the recognition of Elvira, whose vision and sensitivity are a benchmark in the field of artistic creation.
Gonzalo Elvira (Patagonia, Argentina, 1971) studied at the Antonio Berni School of Visual Arts in Argentina and began his exhibition career in 1993. He currently lives and works in Barcelona since 2000, and combines his artistic side with an intense educational and pedagogical work concentrated in the Obra Door studio, which he manages and directs in the Gracia neighborhood. In 2019, he received the prestigious Beca de Artes Plásticas by Botín Foundation, where he is preparing an exhibition for 2022.
Elvira has exhibited his work in numerous art centers and galleries both in Europe and America. In recent years, his works have been acquired by various public and private collections in various countries. He presented the exhibition Idilio (2019-2020) at RocioSantaCruz gallery, a germinal work that gives rise and continuity to his later projects, including the installation ‘Sueños’. Elvira received the GAC Artist Award for Best Gallery Show.
Visit the exhibition Idilio en RocioSantaCruz again.
Gonzalo Elvira receives the Ciutat de Palma Award for ‘Sueños’ Read More »
Andrés Galeano (Mataró, 1980) habla de su trayectoria, sus influencias y sus proyectos pasados y futuros en una interesante entrevista para Neo2 Magazine. De Wittgenstein a Google Street View pasando por Instagram y el Zeitgeist, Galeano reflexiona en este artículo sobre la posmodernidad y el lugar donde se encaja su tan atípico trabajo artístico. Su última investigación, meteorológica y de archivo, culminará en una serie de exposiciones en 2021.
Andrés Galeano in Neo2 Magazine november-december 2020 Read More »
In this third issue of Paris Photo online, we present you the work of Palmira Puig-Giró (Tàrrega, 1912 – Barcelona, 1978), an avant-garde photographer exiled in Brazil, whose work remained unknown until RocioSantaCruz discovered it in 2018. Palmira Puig-Giró was, along with Marcel Giró, Rubens Teixeira Scavone and Germán Lorca, among others, a member of the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante, one of the most important artistic movements in Brazilian photography.
Since RocioSantaCruz presented her for the first time in Europe at Paris Photo 2018, Puig-Giró’s work has been included in important international collections. The MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York) will feature her photographs in the exhibition Photoclubism: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946-1964 in March 2021.
Palmira Puig-Giró. Estudos, 1950
A rediscovered signature
For decades, Palmira Puig-Giró was known as her husband’s muse, photographer Marcel Giró. It was not until 2018 that Rocío Santa Cruz, going through the Giró estate with the help of Toni Ricart, Marcel’s nephew, found two photographic languages, two different, albeit intimately intertwined, authorships which coexisted in the photographer’s archives. Following the traces of this unknown signature, they came to an important conclusion: not only was Palmira the author of a significant oeuvre, but Marcel’s own authorship acquired, thus, a new meaning. The tale of the artist and his muse became obsolete and gave way to a more complex, horizontal, and richer narrative. Both artists shared camera, reel, stages; each with their own look.
The faces of the avant-garde
Palmira Puig-Giró was, along with Gertrudes Altschul, Menha S. Polacow, Barbara Mors and Dulce G. Carneiro, one of the few women who were part of the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante, a collective of avant-garde photographers located in São Paulo. Her work articulates an experimental corpus of portraits and landscapes, where metaphor and social criticism are framed in the same capture. Puig-Giró’s photography is clearly influenced by the avant-garde, seen in her use of black and white contrasts, but her signature has a more humanistic touch than that of her Paulist colleagues. While the latter tended to sublimate the abstract, the pure moment of visual interruption, Puig-Giró goes beyond the instant and the object. The photographer widens her vision to show the surroundings of her photographs, the faces, stories and memories of the places she visits with her camera, and takes everyday life and gestures to an aesthetic level that is as detailed as it is poetic.
Paris Photo online #3 – Palmira Puig-Giró Read More »
For this second issue of Paris Photo online we proudly present Andrés Galeano (Mataró, 1980), an artist who works with drawing, photography, video, installation and performance. Andrés lives in Berlin where he develops his production. He has exhibited in cities throughout Europe, the United States, Latin America and Canada.
On this occasion we show you a selection of pieces from his Unknown Photographers series, a project where the artist makes collages with analog photos he randomly finds at local markets and where he reflects the latent desire inside every photograph to transcend the moment.
Paris Photo online #2 – Andrés Galeano Read More »
Following up on our last issue for Paris Photo online, we present you the second part of our edition on the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB). RocioSantaCruz works actively with the family archive of numerous FCCB artist and is an international referent for the study and dissemination of Fotoclubismo. Here we introduce you to the work of Germán Lorca.
Germán Lorca (São Paulo, 1922)
Germán Lorca combined his professional career as an accountant with amateur photography, and joined the FCCB in 1949. It was not long before photography became his sole profession. In 1952, he quit accountancy for Good and opened his first photographic studio. As a direct effect of the fervent debates between FCCB members on experimentation and the limits of visual language, the early years of Lorca’s artistic career are marked by a frenetic productivity and a clear desire to transcend the established aesthetic codes.
Lorca’s work articulates an urban poetics of the streets of São Paulo, one composed of landscapes which become at once familiar and uncanny. Combining intimacy and estrangement, he creates ambiguous and suggestive compositions. Roland Barthes’ punctum acquires, here, an unforeseen leading role, as Lorca’s photographs are filled with perforations, tears, unsettling (mis)encounters hidden in apparently familiar scenarios. It is only when we look through these visual crevices, and not around them, that we can unravel Lorca’s fascinating imaginary, the lucid freedom of his gaze.
His work has been included in major collections around the world, such as como Banco Itaú (São Paulo), Museu de Arte de São Paulo(MASP), Pinacoteca do Estado (São Paulo), Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (Miami) and MoMA (New York).
Paris Photo online #6 – Germán Lorca Read More »
Pepo Hernando – El Temps de les Arts Read More »
In this fourth issue of Paris Photo online, we present you with the work of Antoni Campañà (Arbúcies, 1906 – Sant Cugat del Vallès, 1989), photographer whose work moves between pictorialism and avant-garde experimentation. Also known as a leading photojournalist, his photographs of the Spanish Civil War remained unknown until 2019. Campañà collected nearly 5,000 photographs of the war and kept them hidden for decades.
RocioSantaCruz is currently working with Campañà’s unpublished oeuvre. Paris Photo 2020 was to host the first international presentation of Campañà’s work We are pleased to share some of his photographs in this online edition.
The double gaze of Antoni Campañà
Antoni Campañà was born at the same time as photojournalism, a field in which he made his career as a sports reporter and pioneer of the tourist postcard. Before turning thirty, Campañà had achieved wide national and international recognition for his refined mastery of bromoleum technique. In the years before the Spanish Civil War, he received numerous awards and consolidated his position as an artist. He was a member of Agrupació Fotogràfica de Catalunya and in 1933 he traveled to Munich to train with photographer Willy Zielke. He carried out an important work of experimentation and innovation, thus transcending the pictorialist parameters and becoming an unparalleled benchmark of experimental photography in Spain. From those early 30s, we still have compositions like Tracció de sang (1933), framed within the traditional portrait of farming and tradition.
When the war broke out, Campañà’s political commitment made its way into his work, leading him to compose an extensive photographic documentation of the war. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Campañà’s visual testimony remained hidden for decades. Thirty years after his death, his family found the images stored in red boxes, which come to light in La Caja Roja (2019), an investigation of Plàcid Garcia-Planas, the historian Arnau Gonzàlez i Vilaltaand the photographer David Ramos, published in Catalan and Spanish by Comanegra and by Éditions du Seuil in French.
Untitled, 1928-1930
Reflecting on this unknown period, it becomes clear that the Spanish Civil War opened a symbolic trench that Campañà was forced to cross, not only as a citizen, but also as an artist. As he moved from one side to the other, his career changed radically. The early Campañà, concerned with meticulous preparation and aesthetic harmony, gave way to a Campañà shaken by the frantic rhythms of battle, death and reality. His camera turned him into a witness to the horrors of truth, and only when shooting with the Rolliflex, which he reserved for portraits, did he allow himself to explore a more avant-garde style.
As a reflection of the ravages of war, the artist’s decision can be read as a symbolic attempt to bury an all too painful past. The Franco dictatorship foreclosed the mere possibility of creating spaces of social reparation where losses, both political and personal, could be avowed. Thus, Campañà’s silence regarding this period of his work is understood as a direct effect of the sheer lack of collective languages of mourning, an effect of the impossibility of addressing trauma. Campañà’s work speaks about the trajectory of an artist, about how his gaze adapts to the volatility of life, but it also speaks about the importance of collective memory. Thanks to his red boxes, today we can add new pieces to our narrative and find new words to name our grief.
Paris Photo online #4 – Antoni Campañà Read More »
In this eighth issue of Paris Photo online, we present you the work of Miguel Rio Branco (Las Palmas, 1946), one of Brazil’s contemporary artists with widest international recognition.
His multidisciplinar career crosses over the fields of photography, painting, video and installation. Rio Branco’s highly poetical compositions are characterised by an eloquent and overwhelming aesthetic, which often relies on his use of chromatic intensity and chiaroscuro techniques.
Rio Branco is currently featured in two important exhibitions in Europe and Latin America. Le Bal, in Paris, gathers his first photographic period in Miguel Rio Branco – Photographies 1968-1992, which will be held from December 16 until March 21 2021. In São Paulo, Instituto Moreira Salles presents Palavras cruzadas, sonhadas, rasgadas, roubadas, usadas, sangradas, an intensive retrospective which, taking the artist’s personal archive as a point of departure, goes over the main themes of his work.
Visceral aesthetics in the aftermath of pictorialism
Rio Branco does not shy away from the body, rather he dives into visceral tones. His photography and cinema bear the influence of his pictorial training, which imbues his style with a particular materiality. Displacement, loss and grief are key themes in Rio Branco’s oeuvre. Pain and sexuality are sublimed in his use of saturation and contrast. All of these elements are conjugated under a prevalent sign of ambivalence, especially in his photographs: opposing courses of action confront each other, caught in a vicious struggle over the ownership of the image. Turned into a sort of visual trench, the image becomes a site of excess, heavy with meaning. Rio Branco does not intend to mirror that which already is, but rather he creates new possibilities of existence, new gazes, new truths.
Paris Photo online Read More »
Es un placer anunciaros que la galería RocioSantaCruz ha recibido dos Premios GAC 2020, a la Mejor Programación en Galería y al Artista por la Mejor Exposición en Galería, para Gonzalo Elvira por su exposición Idilio.
Queremos agradecer a los miembros del jurado su reconocimiento y, de parte del equipo de RocioSantaCruz, dedicárselo a los artistas que integran nuestro proyecto. Su arrojo, excelencia e incansable empeño nos reafirman en nuestro camino y nos recuerdan que el arte es un lugar que habitamos conjuntamente.
En estos momentos tan duros, personal y profesionalmente, y con el sector cultural fuertemente sacudido por los estragos de la crisis sanitaria, recibir estos premios tiene un significado especial que queremos compartir con todos los compañeros y compañeras del gremio de galeristas. A quienes os quedáis trabajando después de bajar la persiana, a quienes no dejáis de buscar nuevas formas de acercar el arte al público, y de abrir puertas a través de la cultura. A todos y todas que vivís con pasión vuestro trabajo, este reconocimiento también es vuestro. Si algo ha quedado claro este año, es que necesitamos andar juntos.
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