Isabel Croxatto Galería arrives in Madrid in collaboration with the art space Galería Nueva, with two solo exhibitions by the artists Coco González Lohse and Johans Peñaloza. Both exhibitions, which gather recent paintings around the exploration of crisis scenarios, will be open to the public from 3 to 30 June in the Spanish capital.
After more than a year of pandemic and the impossibility of travelling, and after participating remotely in the international art fair Art Central Hong Kong 2021 in May, Isabel Croxatto Galería presents its first collaboration with Galería Nueva, art space located in the "art street" of Madrid, with the exhibitions La Tierra Prometida by Coco González Lohse, and Ensamblajes Territoriales by the emerging artist Johans Peñaloza.
Located in the renowned Doctor Fourquet street, behind the Reina Sofía Museum, Galería Nueva opened its doors in January 2020 under the direction of the Spanish artist, curator and cultural agent Daniel Silvo, as a space that temporarily hosts projects by Hispanic and foreign art galleries.
La Tierra Prometida [The Promised Land] by Coco González Lohse presents 22 small-format oil paintings on canvas and canvas board, in which the artist continues the journey begun with El Turista last year. If his tiny, naked and masked characters previously travelled in search of a lost paradise, in La Tierra Prometida they have found it, but it was not "the happy copy of Eden" they had hoped for.
González Lohse's paintbrush portrays different landscapes of Chile, which are adorned with cheerful and innocent colours while concepts such as "Grief", "Hunger" and "Delirium" appear in the style of the famous Hollywood sign over a fractured physical and human geography, like a cornice in permanent risk of falling. The immensity of the land engulfs its protagonists, giving way to issues of contemporary life, such as global warming and the collapse of the system.
Ensamblajes Territoriales is the first solo exhibition by the young artist Johans Peñaloza, who was part of the open call made by Isabel Croxatto Galería in December 2019 for the exhibition El Mundo Al Instante N°1. Through a series of 12 acrylics on canvas, Peñaloza presents the vestiges of urban landscapes decimated after the demonstrations resulting from the Chilean 18O social outburst.
Like a nocturnal explorer, the artist captured fleeting instants of barricades, burning vehicles, debris, spaces on the edge of destruction, as a testimony of social discontent amid a context of tension, reinterpreting them through painting in a raw and unconstrained way. The city is the stage where inequalities are most clearly manifested, and Johans Peñaloza's painting presents its results on human geography.
On the work of both artists, Daniel Silvo comments: "The absence of colour in Peñaloza's work reminds us of Bosch's representation of the world in the folding front panels of his triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, also without characters, also desolate. The grisaille emphasises this sense of despair and drama, also reminding us of Francisco de Goya's series of engravings The Disasters of War". "In González Lohse's paintings there is also a mixture of small personal dramas of individuals lost in nature and the landscape. The desolation faced by these characters, with whom we can identify, reminds us of European Romantic painting and of those sublime natural settings in which the protagonists are presented in front of the immensity," he adds.
La Tierra Prometida by Coco González Lohse and Ensamblajes Territoriales by Johans Peñaloza will be open to the public from 3 to 30 June at Galería Nueva, Calle Doctor Fourquet 10, Madrid.
