DIPLOMATIC ART 2015, 2nd event - City Hall Gallery

DIPLOMATIC ART 2015, City Hall Gallery (Galeria Primariei) Timisoara, opening of the 2nd exhibition - November 12th - with artists from countries that had consular missions opened in Timisoara during the interwar period but that currently are not represented here anymore (Belgium, Guatemala, Paraguay, Slovakia and The United Kingdom). 

Participating artists (with their works and concept presentations):

MARTIN BAEYENS (Belgium) http://users.telenet.be/martin.baeyens 
Nature is at the centre of his art work. He seeks for a balance between technology and nature and uses therefore electronic circuit print plates. 

 Martin Baeyens – I do not just exist - freedom of speech, CGD, 42 x 59,5 cm, 2014

MARTYN HILL (United Kingdom) www.walkerhill.org Art Favours Nothing in Particular - My Interest is in reanimating earlier strains of European abstraction. Specifically paintings relationship between objecthood (the wall) and illusion (the window), a pictorial, fictive space, which blurs the distinction between the abstract and the material world. Reworking Greenberg's pejorative term 'homeless representation' into a positive avenue of enquiry my making is characterised by shifts between flat planes and illusory depth. Here is a recognition that illusionism is an inescapable consequence of mark making and that depiction and illusionism are in fact, just as real and elemental to painting as surface, edge and colour. Questioning whether painting should reject or cultivate its capacity to create pictorial space and contrary to the expansionism that currently dominates almost every aspect of contemporary art, I see paintings basic underlying binary opposition between plane and depth, figure and ground, puts forward a radical modesty examining a visual fiction and its implications. Since 1999 I have regularly worked and exhibited in collaboration with Michael Walker under the name WalkerHill. 

 Martyn Hill – Frobel 6, drawing, 32 x 23 cm, 2015

EVA HNATOVÁ (Slovakia): http://evahnatova.wix.com/prints These works are part of a large drawing-graphic cycle To touch (2010-2015). I see these works as a personal act of being touched by the suffering of unknown people, which is daily presented by the media, as a serious effort of symbolic identification with their suffering and symbolic transfer on myself. To express these contents I used a special material (carbon paper) as well as the author's technique of printing on carbon paper. The first phase of work is collecting visual reports about contemporary disasters, mysteries, troubles, destruction and loss. These data are the base for my artistic commentaries. I collect them from newspapers, internet, TV as technical images. I then redraw them as a spiritual and physical touching of the suffering people. "Re-drawings" (tracing, calks), which are created, are then printed by thermal process on the paper or carbon paper as monoprints. The material, techniques and processes (copying, retracing, clipping, ironing, printing, reproduction...) have in my artistic message a symbolic value and are an important key to the "reading" and understanding it.

 

 Eva Hnatová – Lamentation 4, author’s technique, 97 x 42 cm, 2012

DIANA ROSSI (Paraguay) http://www.dianarossi.com.py The paintings were inspired by Petroglyphs Ancestral Myths - It is one of the greatest mysteries of Paraguayan Prehistory. Nobody knows who engraved then on the rocks, or in which exact age they were made. It’s supposed that they are related to the religion and hunting activities of the ancient inhabitants on the territory that now is Paraguay. Minimalist designs such as small suns, points, lines, abstract figures, try to express some important messages, either related to hunting or some ritual of the ancient inhabitants of that zone. When the Spanish arrived 500 years ago, there were numerous indigenous groups who relocated periodically for hunting and recollection. The indigenous people developed a culture that we assume were reflected on the stones as a cultural manifestations. We don’t know their meaning because there have been no studies on extinct populations - on the Paraguayan area - until the arrival of the Spaniards in 1528. All of these should be part of a Paraguayan History related to its Prehistoric origins. 

Diana Rossi – Petroglyphs 25, mixed media on canvas, 35 x 23 cm, 2015