Closed Paradise

An exhibition featuring works by Javier Viver, José Val del Omar and Lili Chin.

The exhibition explores themes of nature and extinction. It refers to a banishment from a paradisiacal state, both metaphorical and literal, that mirrors our current environmental situation. This cross-cultural and multidisciplinary exhibition focuses on the legacy of earth’s natural resources and states of erosion and extinction due to human activity.

Viver will create a Rainbow site-specific installation of melting colored wax on the window panes and use objects molded from casts of plant species and an herbarium to compose The Eurasia Archive of Extinct Plants. In this way he drafts a reflection about the paradoxical co-existence of the ephemeral and the eternal, memory and the imagination.

Chin uses drawing, installation and Super 8 film in a meditative process to investigate landscapes and glacial erratics. Her materials include charcoal and clay to examine erasure and the romantic concept of the sublime in vanishing landscapes.

Val del Omar’s works reference The Alhambra, the moorish palace in the South of Spain, a place he called the closed paradise. It was the hidden place Val del Omar often visited, and that he filmed as the lost paradise.

About the artists

Javier Viver is an interdisciplinary visual artist. His work proposes a conceptual dialog between iconoclasm and imaginary according with the Spanish tradition of the religious imagery makers or imagineria. He has shown his work internationally including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; The Queens Museum of Art, New York; La Recoleta, Buenos Aires or Galleria Nazionale D’Arte Moderna in Rome. In 2010 he was commissioned with Javier Ortiz Echagüe to install the PLAT laboratory of Val del Omar, after defending his doctoral thesis entitled Val del Omar Laboratory. Viver is currenlty based in Madrid and Shanghia.

With an extraordinary artistic and technological talent, José Val del Omar was a ”believer in cinema” inspired by new horizons that he formulated in the term PLAT –representing the totalizing concept of a “Picto-Luminic-Audio-Tactile” art– apart from being a contemporary and a comrade of Lorca, Cernuda, Renau, Zambrano and other figures of a Silver Age of the Spanish culture, interrupted by the Civil War. In 1928 he anticipated various of his most characteristic techniques, including the ”apanoramic overflow of the image” beyond the limits of the screen, and the concept of ”tactile vision.” These techniques. and those of ”diaphonic sound” and other explorations in the field of electro-acoustics, would be applied in his Tríptico Elemental de España (Elementary Tryptich of Spain), begun in 1953 and only finished after his death. Hi s work and tenacious research activity –quite against any tendency of misunderstanding and forgetfulness– did not begin to be rediscovered until shortly before his death, though it has constituted the beginning of a renaissance that continues to draw followers. ”Endless,” as he would put at the end of his films.

Lili Chin is an artist based in New York City. Combining installation, video and sculpture, her work focuses on nature and architecture to explore rituals in time, bridging contemporary and ancient ideas about the quotidian sublime. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and holds an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. She has participated in several international residencies, including the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai. Her work has been exhibited internationally in New York, Ecuador, Beijing, Shanghai, Mexico City and more. She has curated programs in New York City and abroad.

Opening reception on Thursday, October 1, from 6 pm to 9 pm.