Galeria Fermay - Palma de Mallorca, Spain
6 June - 12 Sept, 2024

Galería Fermay is pleased to present Space In Between, a group show featuring the works of Julia da Mota, Sebastien Pauwels, and Evi Vingerling.

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Space In Between brings together three artistic practices whose approach to painting is built upon very specific notions of space. While Pauwels’ artistic practice essentially deals with the idea of constructing a painting, Da Mota and Vingerling are concerned with notions such as the body, memory or architecture. Space In Between thinks of painting as a wildly experimental medium open to multiple approaches that do not necessarily have to be restricted to the traditional formal categories; instead, we put forward the notion of the painterly which, in our opinion, seems to be a better-equipped term to encompass the wide array of practices when it comes to the medium. Here we refer to meaningful and diverse pictorial processes built upon mark after mark that allows for a sort of forward motion where an entanglement of ideas crystallizes.

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The idea and the representation of space have been fundamental to the development of art since its very beginnings. From cave paintings to gothic altarpieces, gaining momentum during the Renaissance with the invention of the geometric perspective, there has been so much experimentation around it, especially throughout the 19th and 20th centuries with avant-garde artists who reimagined it all. It is only normal, then, that painting has become a repository of very diverse ideas where artists apply their own logic. More specifically, when we talk about space applied to painting it might indeed refer to many things; from an actual illusory depiction of it, such as in traditional landscape painting, to a deconstructed view of it, as it might happen with a Cubist artwork, or an actual materialization of it, like in the case of Lucio Fontanas’ Spazialismo, only to mention very few examples. Besides these formal concerns, however, there are also other approaches to space that refer to the realm of emotions, such is the case, for instance, of gesturalism as exemplified throughout the work of Abstract Expressionism, or the subtlety of optical illusions derived from Op Art and Kinetic Art, or the intimacy of the body as in the case of contemporary artists such as Lee Ufan or Juan Uslé. In painterly terms, then, the notion of space is above all an idea, an approach, that adapts to the conceptual strategies put forward by artists.

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Julia da Mota develops an intimate body of work that primarily comes from the artist’s relation with her most immediate surroundings. Drawing from the 20th-century Western geometric abstract tradition up to the present, the work of Da Mota defies the idea that non-objective art has to be necessarily cold and distant. In her case, we find the exact opposite —an eminently formal body of work that primarily arises from the affective. Julia da Mota’s oeuvre results from a paused and reflexive work methodology —the way she marks the unprimed canvas gives prevalence not only to the material qualities of the medium but also to the very act of doing it. In her compositions, we see a very clear idea of structure but also an understanding of fluidity that does away with any form of formal rigidity. By making use of heavily diluted pigments, Da Mota is able to control the density of the pictorial matter that slowly penetrates the intricate surface of the canvas thus creating a sense of depth. The interplay of lines, planes, and chromatic masses generate a distinctive body of work that, although at first sight might be perceived as soft abstraction, is actually informed by concrete reality such as the rich Modern Brutalist architecture tradition so characteristic of her hometown of São Paulo in Brazil.