Preview: ‘Polification’ Group show at Plasticmurs in Valencia, Spain

This Friday March 11th is the opening of POLIFICATION a new group show at PlasticMurs gallery in Valencia, Spain that will count with the participation of Spanish and international artists like Etnik (IT), Jessica Hess (US), Manolo Mesa, Mohamed Lghacham and Sebas Velasco (ES).
POLIFICATION, a linguistic construction that derives from the words Polis (Greek for city) and Polify (to make something useless in a careless way), speaks about our relationship to the city, the constant development of the urban landscape that surrounds us, and how we relate to it. The exhibition offers an intimate and nostalgic portrait of the city seeing through the eyes of these five artists, focusing on its overwhelming and uncontrolled growth, and what these changes mean for them.

Press release:

‘We live in agitated cities —Roberto Arlt would have called them epileptic cities— that overwhelm us. At times it’s because of their strange growth through general plans of housemanization urban planning, sometimes out of habit, sometimes by the way in which the substrate populations overlap each other,as layers of time, as waves of migration, as organized gangs defining their areas of operation in neighbourhoods and suburbs. Our territory, we, our cities now, are the post evolution of the modern city invented by the romantic flânerie of the nineteenth century and the futuristic art of the twentieth century —Metropolis, the Paul Citroën collage always comes to mind—, several global wars and postmodern reconstructions, all revolutions, paying attention to phenomena such as gentrification and the nonsense that governs the media world.

Everyone in their home and everyone in our districts are forced to the limit by the city’s demands. We push our apartments as we also push the margins of urban reinvention to a sea of masonry and construction, which are our history and resources, so often stupidly neglected. The painting en cuadro of Manolo Mesa and Mohamed L’Ghacham show these scenarios, the worn out spaces for this necessary action, setting the right place or the people who live in them; Sebas Velasco’s work transfers the power and urgency of the act of painting on the street, underlining it’s complaint; On his behalf, Alessandro Etnik’s geometric structures build an abstract vision, an ideal, with simple lines. The four previous artists develop part of their work on the street, and the contrasting element is set by Jessica Hess’ hyperrealism, not involved with walls but transferring onto canvas the beauty of the horror vacui of a total invasion of tags and graffiti that, with hysteria, recall to the deterioration of our cities.’ – Ricardo Forriols, Vice-dean of Culture, UPV.

POLIFICATION opens this Friday March 11th and will be on view until april 8th at PlasticMurs gallery located on Calle Denia 45, Valencia, Spain.
www.plasticmurs.com

Images courtesy of Vicente Torres (PlasticMurs)