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2009

Press Release

Ramón de Soto: “Reflections on memory”
From March 16th to May 1st, 2009


The Gabarrón Foundation presents the exhibition “Ramón de Soto. Reflections on memory”, in association with the IVAM.

The show at the Gabarrón Foundation in New York features many key pieces from the career of this “man of culture” as Ramón de Soto has been called, all works from the IVAM Collection. The volumes of the sculptures advance and retreat in their measure depending on the artist’s need to communicate at any given moment. For Ramón, art is, among many other things, communication, inquiry and investment, made with a specific language also understood as one of the forms of expression of our surrounding environment: “A drive of man”, as Cerni defined it. In this way, it finds a rationale that orders the disperse, able to help structure the being itself from a circumstantial and historical temporality and to profile its vocation pitted against the absolute. “What I ultimately materialize is my own existence, and as such I am looking for meaning to my own existence through what I am constructing”, the sculptor from Valencia claims when speaking of this retrospective. The exhibition comprises ten sculptural pieces and fourteen drawings. The sculptor is particularly interested in the opening of new thresholds of consciousness and provoking this from silence, from nothingness, from the eloquent lyricism and the emotional suggestion that transmutes the void into life.

Passionate about Greek mythology, Buddhism and all other systems of beliefs that wish to bring meaning to our social reality, De Soto has a special bent for Zen philosophy. This is made explicit in his mandalas, where the emotion lies in the sculptural object similarly to how a verbal icon becomes a self-referential object in a scenario where words take on a volume independently of the objects of the real world external to them. In this regard, in the interior of his work there exists a flow of energies that generates a meaning of the material animated in its absolute stillness.

“The form lives”, De Soto maintains. Steel, the material he normally works with, is as moldable as any other element and, as De Soto explains, has its own internal laws, movements, drives that, once one knows them, empathy grows between material and artist that produces a phenomenon of unprecedented feedback. The energies flow together and the final piece takes on a “different” life in the hands of the artist. Exploring this exhibition by Ramón de Soto one could say that with the passing of time the artist from Valencia has created a double nature approaching a new type of reality, where his ideas and experiences not only desire to represent reality but also to intervene in it and give it form. The form in Ramón de Soto’s hands manifests the expression of a social end because it starts out from a spiritual end. Hence, in its syntactic reductionism, and in its taste for the social, it symbolizes the framework that best represents the creative output liberated from the very inside of the artist.

The Gabarrón Foundation Carriage House Center for the Arts has been serving the Spanish and American communities since 2002 promoting the Spanish and Latin American Arts and Culture in the States through exhibitions, seminars, lectures... It is a meeting point for people, organizations and governments to promote the exchange of world cultures. 

 

For additional information and /or images of the exhibition, please contact:
212.573-6968 ext 10