Sand, stone and cloth
After having brought together the work of both artists on several occasions, both in projects in the gallery and in fairs, this time Susana Solano and Simon Callery come together in the unique setting of the Church of the Cistercian Monastery of Santa María de Bujedo de Juarros, in Burgos.
While Callery participates in this dialogue with two of his "flat paintings", Solano has created an ephemeral installation entitled "Fragments and links" conceived specifically for the site.
Mariano Navarro points out in his text "Invitados pertinentes" that "certain biographical details link Susana Solano and Simon Callery. Her sculptural training and relatively early success. However, their origins are curiously inverse: Solano began her practice as a painter and moved almost immediately to sculpture. Callery, although he began with painting, had a fundamentally sculptural training, which he transferred immediately after graduating to painting".
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British artist Simon Callery makes physical paintings. His works have an emphasis on materiality. Callery became a new addition to the artists represented in our gallery, with his first solo exhibition in Spain which we presented in 2021. His paintings are often made in direct contact with the hard surfaces of the urban environment or on location in the landscape. He has worked in collaboration with... Read more
Barcelona-born Susana Solano began her artistic career with a brief journey into painting in the early 1980s that ended up taking her into the medium she has continued to work in ever since: sculpture. Her work is frequently linked to postminimalism, as well as to other Spanish sculptors like Julio González, Jorge Oteiza and Eduardo Chillida. Iron and wicker are common in her art, although... Read more
With the doors closed the church is dark and we encounter the art works in low light. The only light introduced into this environment is the flickering yellow light thrown by the candle flames in Susana Solano’s 10-metre floor-based work. The candles stand in clusters in a sequence of slightly raised galvanized iron troughs filled with red sand. Passing her hand directly through the sand, the artist has left a trail of marks, ridges and touches that establish a visual relationship with the detail of the stone floor of the church. One end of this work sits in darkness whilst the other reaches a point in the nave where a passage of natural light enters through a glass door. The candles are symbols of the religious rites we expect to encounter in a Catholic church but the flames they produce now function as a material for the sculptor. The candlelight illuminates the red sand which is echoed in the other reds and oranges in the stones of the church, in the two paintings by Simon Callery and in the traces of blood on the forehead of Christ in the Zurbarán painting.
Sand, stone and cloth are the primary materials that unify the artists and the architecture in this exhibition. They have been used for very different reasons but if we are sensitive to materiality we make the connections that reveal the underlying shared concerns and common ground.
