“Face au soleil” by Melissa Raymond & René Sandín will open at Km 0.2 (Cerra Street 619, second floor) on Saturday, August 6, 2022, from 18:00 to 22:00.
Km 0.2 is pleased to present its next exhibition entitled “Face au soleil”, the first exhibition of the duo Melissa Raymond and René Sandín in this art venue.
The artists present a body of work driven by the need to position themselves in front of the sun. The practice activates a portal of sorts through its association with the sun as an element associated with the Caribbean and the island and creates a meditation on the here and the hereafter.
The collected works are developed from a well-known project on Puerto Rican municipal painting – titled Domestic Tourism– but from the perspective of distance, a distance that is also dazzling, like the sun itself. Where the “inside” aspect of domestic tourism becomes impossible, artists cling to their color samples as pieces of land, memory of another time and transform their approach to the politicized color taken from the municipalities of the island of Puerto Rico . Here the duo redirects the gaze to a mystical, symbolic and primitive realm: a nod to ancestral pictorial expressions towards the sun and other natural forms. Seen in this way, the exhibition alludes to a metaphysical passage of time: an extra-corporeal (territorial) experience of domestic tourism.
In this body of work, the duo alters, superimposes, and regroups communal color codes—blurring the geographic limitations of the palette—and approaches colors from aspects of energy and symbolic charge. The result is a production on the opposite end of the scientific spectrum, representing the phenomena of the Caribbean landscape – sunsets, waterfalls, heat – from a spiritual and ethereal spectrum. The works here point to a tropical iconography of the sublime, an ancestral holiday based on communal painting. With the sun as the vanishing point.
[Translated by Ivette Romero.] For more information, see https://www.elkilometro.org/
