Tag: spain

David Velduque, “No Place Like Home”: Film History Series

David Velduque, “No Place Like Home”, A Film for LGBTIQ Rights, World Pride 2017, Produced by NEURADS

“No Place Like Home”, starring Marius Praniauskas, is the story of Niko, a guy who enjoys his life and his sexuality at it’s full potential. Suddenly he will have to go back home to his country in eastern Europe to take care of his ill mother. Nothing is what it seems and soon he will realize what is really going on. A breathtaking roadtrip about the discrimination and violence against the LGTBIQ community around the world.

David Velduque was born on January 28, 1984 in Madrid, Spain. He is an actor and director, known for “No Place Like Home” (2017), “Por un Beso”(2016) and “Crudo”(2017).

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Puente Nuevo Bridge

Puente Nuevo Bridge, Ronda, Spain

Ronda is a city in the Spanish province of Málaga. It is located about 100 kilometres west of the city of Málaga, within the autonomous community of Andalusia. The Puente Nuevo is the newest and largest of three bridges that span the chasm that carries the Guadalevín River and divides the city of Ronda, in southern Spain.

The construction of the Puente Neuvo Bridge that stands today was started in 1759 and took 34 years to build. There is a chamber above the central arch that was used for a variety of purposes, including as a prison. During the 1936-1939 civil war both sides allegedly used the prison as a torture chamber for captured opponents, killing some by throwing them from the windows to the rocks at the bottom of the El Tajo gorge. The chamber is entered through a square building that was once the guard-house. It now contains an exhibition describing the bridge’s history and construction.

Construction of the previous bridge started in 1735, this was the first attempt to span the gorge at this height and was completed by the architects Jose Garcia and Juan Camacho using a single arch design. Unfortunately, this bridge was quickly and poorly built and in 1741 the entire bridge collapsed resulting in the death of 50 people.

Dionisio Gonzalez

Surreal Fantasy Architecture by Dionisio Gonzalez

The work of architect and photographer Dionisio Gonzalez focuses on the chaos caused by both man and nature. Using art as social action, González reveals economic disparities, and ultimately uses the power of architecture for an antidote to the world’s problems. Traveling to far corners of the world, such as Ha Long Bay in the Gulf of Tonkin and Busan in South Korea, González, who was born in the autonomous Spanish province of Gijón, makes hypothetical interventions within communities largely isolated from the developed world, which have been ravaged by natural or economic disaster.

Most of his buildings are stilted and cantilevered structures. In order to achieve equilibrium in the building façade, he has taken into consideration the surrounding landscape thus amalgamating it with his design on multiple levels. This creates a very balanced architectural vision which is pleasing in appearance.

Juan Munoz

Sculptures by Juan Munoz

Juan Munoz was a Spanish sculptor, working primarily in paper mache, resin and bronze. He was also interested int he auditory arts and created compositions for the radio. In 2000, Muñoz was awarded Spain’s major Premio Nacional de Bellas Artes in recognition of his work; he died shortly after, in 2001.

His first exhibition was in 1984 in the Fernando Vijande Gallery of Madrid. Since then, his works have been frequently exhibited in Europe and other parts of the world. At the beginning of the 1990s, Juan Muñoz began breaking the rules of traditional sculpture by sculpting works in a “narrative” manner which consisted of creating smaller than life-size figures in an atmosphere of mutual interaction.

Muñoz’s sculptures often invite the spectator to relate to them, making the viewer feel as if they have discreetly become a part of the work of art. His slate-gray or wax-colored monochrome figures create a sort of discreetness due to their lack of individuality, but that absence of individuality questions the viewer, perhaps even so much as to make the viewer uncomfortable. When asked his occupation, Muñoz would respond simply that he was a “storyteller.”

Aurelio Monge

Photography by Aurelio Monge

Born in Andalucia, Spain, Aurelio Monge is a versatile visual artist whose portfolio is inspired deeply by Baroque painters and other Old Masters of Romanticism, Academism, and Symbolism especially Caravaggio, Ribera, Velazquez, David, Gericauld and Bouguereau.

His work also focuses on the human figure impregnated by his enthusiasm for Greco-Roman culture and Classical sculpture particularly Phidias, Lysippus, Michelangelo, Cellini and Giambologna.

He likes to take care of the composition and framing. Taking advantage of natural light and grain textures at high sensibilities. Capturing the motion.  Playing with the expressive possibilities of the models or the sculptural artworks.

Influenced by his own experience with death and the work of Duane Michals and Bill Viola, he is developing several series into the world of videoart that he reserves for future exhibits. Narrative sequences without beginning or end, back and forward in a loop, proposing different logical interpretations and allowing the viewer a sense of recognition and draw their own conclutions. Simple ideas whose theme revolves around concepts of life and death, body and soul, despair and calm, visible and unvisible, nothingness and eternity.

Concha Flores Vay

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Paintings by Concha Flores Vay

Concha Flores Vay is a self-taught artist from a small village in the province of Valladolid , Spain. She now lives in works in Alicante’s Province on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. Her work can be found in private collections in Spain, Germany, Holland and Norway.

“I express myself through my fantasy and creativity. My art-style is very childlike, I love colour, I like to create something different, I don’t follow any trend, I do what I like and the best I can without going out of my art-style, my work is spontaneous.” -Concha Flores Vay

Juan Zelada, “Breakfast in Spitalfields”

Juan Zelada, “Breakfast in Spitalfields” from the EP “What Do I Know”

Juan Zelada is a Spanish singer, songwriter and musician. Raised in a musical family environment, which consisted of jam sessions throughout the different generations, his talent and love for music flourished.

In 2006 he completed his studies at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, where he received an award for composition from Paul McCartney who called his recording a “smashing cd”.

Having moved to London, he set up a band, while still playing in restaurants, pubs, hotels and even cruise ships. He played the London scene to great acclaim and supported Amy Winehouse on her Back to Black tour.

In 2012, Juan Zelada released the single “Breakfast in Spitalfields” which became a national success being the most aired single on BBC Radio 2 only second to Adele.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Antonio Lopez

Antonio Lopez, “Sink and Mirror”, 1967, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

López García studied art in Madrid in the 1950s and lived there after 1960, becoming an instructor at his alma mater, the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando. He has influenced generations of artists as a leader of the Spanish Realists, known for their unyielding depictions of their surroundings and for the long history of painting from which they have evolved. López García’s paintings and sculptures demonstrate not only his keen powers of observation, but also his extraordinary sensitivity to atmosphere and light.

Interior spaces are a recurring theme in López García’s work, particularly the interior of his own studio and bathroom. Though he was initially captivated by the emptiness of his new studio, in Sink and Mirror López captures traces of his own presence. The objects arranged on the shelf below the mirror serve as an autobiographical assemblage that stands in for the (absent) reflection in the mirror.

The artist’s near-obsessive attention to perspective, as hinted by the vertical and horizontal lines of the tiles, cause a rift in the painting’s composition. In order to avoid a terribly inclined perspective, López divided the scene into two views, keeping the traces of process as a mediating buffer in the center.

Juan Gris

Juan Gris, “Still Life with Checked Tablecloth”, Oil on Canvas, 1915, Private Collection

Juan Gris was born in Madrid. He later studied engineering at Madrid’s School of Arts and Sciences. There, from 1902 to 1904, he contributed drawings to local periodicals. From 1904 to 1905, he studied painting with the academic artist José Moreno Carbonero. It was in 1905 that José Victoriano González adopted the more distinctive name Juan Gris.

In 1906 he moved to Paris and became friends with Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Fernand Léger. In Paris, Gris followed the lead of another friend and fellow countryman, Pablo Picasso. He submitted darkly humorous illustrations to journals such as Le Rire, L’assiette au beurre, Le Charivari, and Le Cri de Paris.

Gris began to paint seriously in 1910 (when he gave up working as a satirical cartoonist), developing at this time a personal Cubist style. In A Life of Picasso, John Richardson writes that Jean Metzinger’s 1911 work, Le goûter (Tea Time), persuaded Juan Gris of the importance of mathematics in painting. Gris exhibited for the first time at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants (a painting entitled Hommage à Pablo Picasso).

David Agenjo

Male Figurative Paintings by David Agenjo

David Agenjo is a self-taught artist. He was born in Madrid in 1977 and now lives in London.

Agenjo is heavily influenced by color and texture and combines this in “unexpected” ways on his palette. He is intrigued by almost accidental ways of establishing a textural or color field, so he started incorporating and combining palette works into his actual paintings.

Agenjo always uses a secondary canvas as a palette, this second canvas/palette becomes the new surface on which to overlay and merge the next figurative composition. This palette, covered in random color combinations and textures, becomes the underlayer for his next figurative painting.

In this way, his unpredictable abstract work interacts with his more conscious figurative work process, and each of his paintings is organically linked to the previous one, almost like DNA. Some paintings contain other textural elements besides paint, such as fiberglass, grid tape, or plastic bags. He incorporates these elements in the pallet stage of the canvas building up a rich starting point for the next work.

Fran Recacha

Paintings by Fran Recacha

Fran Recacha was born in Badalona (Barcelona), Spain, in 1976. He graduated in Arts at the University of Barcelona. He has been a figurative and contemporary painter since 2001 and his paintings are in collections of different countries around the world. His work was exhibited at Spain, France, Italy, England, USA.

As a true poet, Fran Recacha touches our sensibility and imagination. Inspired by mythology, history and legends, he paints “”ideistic”“, symbolic and synthetic compositions. The eye revels at precise drawings, the disappearance of brush strokes, the expression of dynamism, energy, movement, or subtle color nuances in the shadows. The imaginary settings composed by Recacha’s mind take us to surrealistic scenes and often contribute to a critical (sometimes satirical or humoristic) perspective of contemporary society. The esthetic harmony of his work, hides truths that Recacha subtly explores: the antagonisms that prevail between vice and virtue, the fantastical and the real, collective memory and modernity.