Artist: José Hidalgo-Anastacio
Dates: September 14th to October 31, 2013

About ‘Feel at home (Sentirse como en casa)’

“Last year, an artist friend of mine was in Madrid in a Residence. Each time I see the imagines of his exposition I forget where they were made”
– José Hidalgo-Anastacio

In Feel at home (sentirse como en casa) José Hidalgo-Anastacio reveals two significant marks of his character: he is an outsider who suffers of the pathological aspiration of inhabiting white cubes. Therefrom, Hidalgo-Anastacio, the outsider, reflexes on his incapacity to pertain and inhabit in any significant way no other space than the white cube, “archetypical place that exceeds the paradigm of the endearing home”.

The white cube, suspiciously neutral, free of all contamination, ready to be intervened, possesses a sense of emptiness of strange and seductive fascist nature, as well as an ambiguous scope through which some experiences are praised in detriment of others, with a modus operandi as universal as legitimating in the Art world. A white cube that is nothing but the gallery which the artist appropriates, affects and inhabits with the certainty that, no matter where he goes, at the end it is possible to feel at home if that archetypical place, that white cube that is the motherland of Hidalgo-Anastacio, exists.

“To show one’s work outside your city demands distance from usual context and companies. It possesses a potential exchange that is useful to engage in self-critical processes. It also gives the opportunity to share one’s work in a different context -yet, al contexts are different- that will provide new and different ideas on such work. There is a challenge in it: one must show its work and itself as a communicational entity, in a predicament on identity and the mutability of previous affections, visions and imaginaries in such a way that when participating/living that context, this later reciprocates and looks back, turning one into the other.

What is most troubling in the idea of displacement is that conscience of inaugurating a new personal surroundings, facing those complex processes by which we define others and others define us, establishing, thus, possible affections and affinities.

This conflict is paradoxical, since I have more of an introspective conduct. Yet, the awareness of having near certain people with whom I have previous exchanges and stories gives me a sort of security. Or is it the idea of lack of that proximity the reason of my anxiety? I mean, these questioning does not arise from the fact that I were confortable in the place I live in. There I have always also felt myself as an outsider; yet, there, I know what to expect.”

In the show, the artists will present drawings on paper from his seriess “Utopography” and “Trasmutatio Mensura Series* as well as installations of pencil on paper from the series “Fluor Gradients* y “Corner Fall Down*. The exhibition will also have an audio work and an intervention in the outside facade of the galley.

About the artist

José Hidalgo-Anastacio (Guayaquil, Ecuador. 1986) has the following individual expositions: Light, Shine & Shadow at the Anthropological and Contemporary Art Museum (MAAC) in 2010; and, ISOS, PHISYS & EGOS at NoMÍNIMO in 2013, both in Guayaquil. He is currently preparing his first individual exposition for PRO GALLERY, Madrid. He has participated in the collective shows Artificios para sobrevivir (Artifices to survive) at the Ccori Wasi Cultural Center in Lima; La seducción de la distancia (Seduction’s distancia), at NoMÍNIMO, Guayaquil. He has won the III edition of the dpm Scholarship (dpm gallery), 2008; and obtained the first price in the LII edition of July Salon of the Municipality of Guayaquil in 2011. His work is part of the collection of the Municipal Museum of Guayaquil and the Texeira de Freitas Collection of Portugal, as well as other private collections. He is work has been showed in art fairs like ZONA MACO in México D.F., Odeón in Bogotá and ARTEBA in Buenos Aires.