Ricardo Pau-Llosa and Rafael López-Ramos @ Aluna Art Foundation

Aluna Art Foundation Cordially invites you to an evening of Poems and Lecture with Ricardo Pau-Llosa and Rafael López-Ramos | Concerning the Spiritual in Art

Ricardo Pau-Llosa is a Cuban-American poet, art critic of Latin American art in the US and Europe, and author of short fiction. His first book of poetry, Sorting Metaphors (Anhinga Press, 1983), won the first national Anhinga Prize. He published a second book of poetry in Bread of the Imagined (Bilingual Press, 1992). His third book of poems, Cuba (Carnegie Mellon U Press, 1993), was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, after which he published Vereda Tropical (1999).  His latest collections are The Mastery Impulse (2003) and Parable Hunter (2008), both from Carnegie Mellon.  A seventh collection is in preparation. A former senior editor of Art International, Pau-Llosa is a frequent contributor to Sculpture and other journals.  He has also published critical studies on Rogelio Polesello, Jesús Soto, Olga de Amaral, Hugo Consuegra, Nicolás Leiva, Fernando de Szyszlo, among other artists, and curated various major exhibitions.  His website is www.pau-llosa.com.

Rafael Lopez-Ramos is a visual artist, critic and curator, born in Cuba, 1962. Graduated from Academia San Alejandro, in Havana. His art has been recently exhibited in his latest solo show WONDERLAND at 17 Frost Art Space, New York, NY, 2012; and the group exhibitions The Art of Dance, Paragon Gallery, Miami, FL, 2012; Base Paint -The Auction, IDEOBOX Artspace, Miami, FL; CAFE XII, Sangre de Cristo Arts Center, Pueblo, CO, 2011. His work is discussed in the book Cuban Artists Across the Diaspora: Setting the Tent Against the House by Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, University of Texas Press, 2011, and has participated in curated group exhibitions like DUODECAD, Edge Zones Art Center, Miami, FL., 2010, Contemporary Cuban Art in New York (CANY), Dactyl Foundation, NY, 2009; Miami: Ciudad Metáfora, Centro Cultural Español, Miami, FL., 2008, and Killing Time, Exit Art, N.Y., 2007. Between 1997-2006, Lopez Ramos resided in Canada, currently lives and works in Miami.

Concerning The Spiritual In Art: Inaugural Exhibition For a Curatorial Alternative Space In Miami

By Adriana Herrera and Willy Castellanos

A little over a century ago, Wassily Kandinsky announced the consolidation of a new abstract language, originating in inner necessity, in spiritual need. André Malraux later reaffirmed that conviction through a prediction which, up to the moment, appears to have been erroneous: “(Art of) The 21st century will either be spiritual, or it will not be.”

At a time when a large part of art dances to the beat of commercial cynicism, Aluna Art Foundation is inaugurating its alternative space for curated exhibitions with a show that rescues the title of the book with which Kandinsky’s threshold concepts opened up the doors to a new understanding: “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” (1911).

The works exhibited in this show reflect a human aspiration that is impossible in principle: to provide a form to that which is formless. To represent the unrepresentable. What renders them valuable is the invention of languages which, in different ways, bring the dialogue with the invisible to the domain of the senses and of thought; the attempt to contain in a visual dimension the relationship of the being with transcendence. Although there is a wide formal diversity in the media employed, all the works constitute an approach to a dialogue with infinity, and each of them incarnates a search for unity not only between individual expression and the universal unconscious, but between art and life: each invited artist engages in a particular form of contemplation, or, in other words, is a seeker of that ultimate “unity” which is the base for forming words such as “religion” (from the Latin “re”, again, and “ligare”, bind), in its wider sense.

“The spiritual life,” Kandinsky wrote, “to which art belongs and of which she is one of the mightiest elements, is a complicated but definite and easily definable movement forwards and upwards. This movement is the movement of experience. It may take different forms, but it holds at bottom to the same inner thought and purpose.”

“Concerning the Spiritual in Art” gathers together thirteen artists living in Miami − or who have been linked to the city − who share the wish to make the invisible visible, and the knowledge that each work transforms the space and the reality of the beholder.

The participating artists are the Argentinean Nicolás Leiva, the Venezuelans Andrés Michelena, Evelyn Valdirio and Lili(ana), the Cubans Heriberto Mora and Raimundo Tarvieso, the and the Colombians Jorge Cavalier and Sara Modiano (1951-2010). With the exception of  Modiano’s  seminal installation, Ser, included as a tribute to this valuable artist who passed away, and who embarked with this work on her search for a representation of the soul, the rest of the pieces reveal little known phases in the production of the invited artists, either because they are part of their most recent work, including pieces that mark the beginning of a new type of exploration, or because although being of great interest, they have never been exhibited before. Also in the adjacent spaces we will have the participation of the painter Margarita Lega and the photographer Juan Carlos Mirabal. Parallel to this, the "Mad Cow Project Room" will be hosting a performance by the US artist Billie Grace Lynn.

From a vision of the eternal photographed in a fleeting instant to the experience of the hand that hits the metal with the concentration of a prayer, or that pretends to play on the surface of silk imitating the movement of retreating waves; from the combination of the trace of a line that synthesizes a spiritual gesture and the artisanal work in a loom to the attempt to unify, on wood or canvas, images of the timelessly sacred and the historical, each of the works included − photographs, paintings, or installations − have originated from different modes of contemplation, and induce it.

Aluna Art Foundation | Press Release

ALUNA ART FOUNDATION |Concerning The Spiritual in Art | From August 25 to October 20, 2012

 MAIN GALLERY

Concerning the Spiritual in Art | Curated by Aluna Curatorial Collective (Adriana Herrera and Willy Castellanos)

 FOCUS LOCUS

The Sons of the Island | A Photographic Essay (selection) by Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich

MAD COW PROJECT ROOM

Billie Grace Lynn | September 6, 2012 | Performance from 7:00pm-9:00pm

ALUNA ART FOUNDATION

172 West Flagler, Miami FL 33130 | Ph.: 305-305-6471

www.alunartfoundation.com  is under construction |  alunartfoundation@gmail.com

Aluna Art Foundation is a non-profit organization, created to promote those artistic practices that question the hegemonic or those that can’t find a place within the Main-Stream. AAF will also work with alternative perspectives with the purpose of widening the margins and thoughts on contemporary art in Miami.

Focus Locus is a space for the work of art after the age of mechanical reproduction.

Flagler 172 Miami is an Aluna curatorial, provisional and alternative art space.

Special Thanks to the Sara Modiano Foundation and The Americas Collection Miami.

The Mad Cow logo was created by young artist Manuel A. Zapata | Miami, September 2012.