Artists
Argentina
Guillermo Mena
Action of Detachment
04.10.21 29.10.21
Guillermo Mena is a visual artist who draws and thinks about this action in an expanded way, something that is constantly affected by the momentary context. Thus, he generates situations that are presented as scenarios that reflect on an ephemeral and transitory dwelling, on the conflicts between attachment and detachment from moments or places that are presented as identity traits and are charged with a constant geographical and poetic displacement.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work is focused on drawing as an active and performative mechanism, I work in processes that reveal situations around a changing and transitory dwelling. I am interested in the transformation of materials as a nostalgic manifestation of the insistence on processing images and situations as ephemeral memories. Destructive scenarios and processes are part of a system of images in which climatic phenomena reflect ritual, emotional, and symbolic aspects that are manifested from the drawing conceived in an expansive way. I think of the drawing as an oscillating element between the intimate and the gigantic, one that allows immersive instances where the body, the gesture, and the time reveal a certain urgency about the finiteness of our presence in an ephemeral home and landscape.
Related Activities
´aceNITE
Marks
Artists in dialogue
09.12.21
When Marks Meet…
On Thursday, December 9th, 2021 we held the last ´aceNITE of the year. That night, we opened our studio so that Hanna Kim and Bomi Ahn, artists-in-residency from South Korea thanks to the agreement that ´ace has with ARKO—Arts Council Korea, inaugurate their exhibitions for the local artistic community together with Guillermo Mena, artist-in-residency from Cordoba with the support of the National Fund for the Arts. In addition, we took the opportunity to celebrate the end of the year and receive ´ace’s extended family with dinner and a toast, celebrating our 16th anniversary of uninterrupted work.
On the afternoon of December 9th, Hanna Kim inaugurated Marks of Love, a site-specific installation in our Políglota Room, through which the artist reflects on the relationship between the environment, hierarchies and happiness, and how the atmosphere in which she creates influences her work. Bomi Ahn presented When Species Meet…, her first excursion into the field of contemporary printmaking, in which she transferred her paintings and drawings to the multiple format. For this new series, Ahn was inspired by the ideas proposed by Donna Haraway in her book of the same name, When Species Meet. Guillermo Mena, on his part, presented an installation with material from his personal archive of frottages, work that he developed in 2021 in our studio during his residency, in which he unfolded years of accumulated material to give it order, shape and find internal logic that allows it to express and expose itself in a cohesive way.
