Angyvir Padilla | De allá, para acá y de otros lados, 2022
50 cm, stainless steel 6 mm
Handmade object.
Price: 855 euros | 780 euros (members). Reserve your copy: info@vriendensmak.be.
Angyvir Padilla (b. 1987, Caracas) was one of the three laureates of the Prize of the Friends of S.M.A.K.
The Prize of the Friends of S.M.A.K. is a national, biennial competition for artists who have recently graduated from a Belgian fine arts college.
Padilla lives and works in Brussels. She explores how we embody memory and argues that, between immanence and transcendence, the traces of our past seep into an enduring present. The environments Angyvir creates alter our perception of reality.
In the exhibition, Padilla showed, among other things, large sculptures inspired by the hopscotch game (in Spanish: rayeula).
In Caracas, the mystical or vertical version of the game, which has the sky as its goal, is never played. Those who have experienced Rayuela, a hopscotch game by Argentine author Julio Cortázar, use the word both as a name for the game and for the poetic and cosmogonic vision that pursues an ever elusive sky.
In the book Rayuela, Argentine intellectual Horacio Oliveira returns, after years of exile, to Buenos Aires and opens a psychiatric institute with a friend. Soon he finds himself on the brink of insanity himself. The book is a fascinating literary experiment that can literally be read in many ways. The sequence of chapters is not strictly prescribed: the reader can read them one after the other, but may also conceive of the book as a hopscotch.
Padilla, during her performance with the sculptures, explored each of the surfaces by jumping from one side to the other. She loses herself in her psyche, getting carried away by the inevitable displacement caused by the game and confronting her own alienation. This creates a break with the straightforwardness of the journey; she moves from there, to here and elsewhere.
With her performance, Angyvir created an unusual atmosphere in which elements tied to the ground are lifted up.
When Padilla was asked to make an edition for the Friends of S.M.A.K., she came up with the idea of making a miniature hopscotch game as well as giving an insight into her sketchbook. A double page contains sketches of the various hopscotch sculptures she would make. The image of the sketchbook is a full-size copy.
Angyvir Padilla (b. 1987, Caracas, Venezuela) studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, ENSAV La Cambre and LUCA School of Arts in Brussels. Recent work by her has been shown at Art Contest, Brussels (2020), Notos Studio, Athens (2019), Ithaka Festival, Leuven (2019) and GBG Arts Gallery, Caracas (2019).
