Fuera(de)forma is a group exhibition showing the projects developed by artists Victor Gonçalves (Brazil), Josephine Lau Jessen (Denmark), Patricio Tejedo (Mexico) and Lena Wurz (Germany) in the framework of Nectar Artist-in-Residence Program.
In collaboration with Espronceda Institute of Art & Culture and within the context of the emerging art festival Art Nou Primera Visió, NectART residency program is based on a call for project proposals which allows resident artists to deepen their artistic and creative process in a rural environment and connect their practice with the Barcelona art scene.
 
Fuera(de)forma [Out(of)space] invites us to explore, play, question and reconsider the path, the materials and the values of the new era. The projects by the four artists are based on their cultural and creative identities and personal motivations, which interconnect with each other and draw inspiration from Nectar's environment.
In Fuera(de)forma, the artists tell stories and evoke questions about ecology and sustainability, about the value system and human consciousness and about the value of the soil/earth in our current and future time.
 
Josephine Jessen highlights the importance of Nature and our relationship with natural cycles and ironizes about the moral boundaries between observation and human intervention in nature through her video work, analogue photographs and installation, in which she invites us to engage and explore new ways of seeing.
Lena Wurz investigates the relationship between walking and thinking by mapping her thoughts and transporting them into different papers and supports, while inviting the public to actively participate in a non-linear game through a playful, instructive and reflexive language.
Victor Gonçalves presents a body of work consisting of three installations in which he raises questions about the values of space, the canons of drawing and the materiality and the time of human beings within the context of our present and future.
Patricio Tejedo works with materials that nature provides us to revalue and give them a new use, materializing the process of turning dust (nothingness) into objects (something) or space, as shown in his pictorial-architectural installation.
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JOSEPHINE LAU JESSEN
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Moving between the academia, the arts, the science and the connections beyond them Josephine Lau Jessen focuses into human alienation and non-human beings from our environment and their cycle patterns through her analogue photographs and film.
Observing patterns and organisms in the mountain environments of Nectar, Josephine Jessen approaches and connects with nature to re-value and portray it, as a result of her concern for the current situation that we are facing due to the effect of human beings on nature, according to the artist: the crisis of care.
The film Be-coming, which investigates the living organisms of the mountains of Vilanova de Sau, is accompanied by music and by a premeditated mechanized voice in off that relates to the images of the film and guide the audience through the artist’s journey and reflections. Through the series of 4 photographs titled How would it sound if silence starts to speak? the artist speaks of the human-nature dichotomy, and with the installation Displacement, the artist brings a part of the forest – a set of pine cones - into the exhibition space, wondering what value they have when exhibited in an art space and remarking that in every pinecone there are the seeds for a new forest, therefore nature is sustainable if we, humans, don’t interfere in a bad way.
In her body of works, Josephine Lau Jessen asks herself how would be living like a tree, like a mountain or like an animal and what can we learn from them, what is the balance between observing and interacting or how are we related to the natural cyclic patterns, inviting us to engage and explore new ways of seeing.
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PATRICIO TEJEDO
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Patricio Tejedo works with materials that nature provides us, such as soil, ash, clay or sand in order to revalue them and give them a new use, discovering their potentialities. The process of getting these materials from nature, cleaning and mixing them with water, leads him to the creation of objects, a creative process that materializes the process of converting the dust (nothingness) into objects (something) or into space.
In “Del Objeto al Espacio” project, these objects take the form of 4.5 cm3 blocks, a measure that corresponds to the size of his hands, which for the artist symbolize a beginning, an object, a space or an ensemble of spaces that embrace bodies and ideas, a common place.
The architectural background of Tejedo opens new spaces in his creation, in where the artist aims to get off the wall and the canvas as a painter. In his installation - consisting of two parabolic arches within a 50 x 50 cm grid, made of cloth and painted with soil with a gradient (from nothing to something), the artist explores new materialities - such as cloths – by creating and incorporating a human scale space where the audience is invited to experience his work space wise, to walk through it and to observe the fifty six blocks of soil by creating different flows and paths.
Patricio Tejedo’s installation is complemented with the documentation of his work process composed by images, sketches, the materials he works with and texts, and shown as a sort of an itemized booklet with the aim to involve the public in his creative procedure by engaging them to re-value these materials and showing that they are accessible to everyone.
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VICTOR GONÇALVES
 
Victor Gonçalves presents a body of works composed by three installations through which the artist explores and arises questions about materiality, the values of space within our current time and society and about the future that is to come, creating his own aesthetic language.

In his series of drawing-installation "In the end everything is a carbon chain", the artist presents a series of tree roots and branches covered in graphite on the white expanse of the wall. The link between these roots that the artist found while walking in the surroundings of Nectar and the graphite symbol is disconcerting: things are not exactly what they look. Here, the artist questions the materiality of things and their relationships, covering the wood with graphite, giving them a different materiality and therefore transforming its meaning. In addition, as the artist says, the paper and the graphite exchange roles inverting the canons of drawing. As well as he does with the papers, giving them other shapes and space by curving them and creating movement between the wall and the branches. Victor Gonçalves alludes to the aesthetic potential of these objects he graphically displays and the compositional and artistic possibilities that are generated.
In “A piece of planet”, a sign reading “Area Privada de Caça” - which was found by the artist in the forests around Nectar - is delimited by a one square meter rubber and it speaks of the value of the land and its ownership, questioning the public/private property in a time where its value is unbalanced and taking as a reference the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s statement “Property is theft”.
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The installation “Hay más futuro que pasado” is an artist’s statement on an eight-meter long rice paper in which the phrase is repeated and gradually fades away. Here, Victor Gonçalves questions our perception of time and our perspective of a better future despite the uncertain and dystopian future that lies ahead us, is there still hope?
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LENA WURZ
Lena Wurz investigates the relationship between walking and thinking, exploring the act and movement of walking, a ritual wandering, through the pace, development and rhythms of her thoughts and emotions. The artist creates her own language and unfolds her narrative with compositions on paper, by combining cuttings from books from different sources, such as guide books specializing in country walking, a summary of human anatomy & movement with her monoprint drawings, her personal observations and records from her walks during the time at Nectar.
The audience is welcomed at the entrance of the space with a pocket size artist book, a tool to visit the exhibition with the aim to perceive their own walking through hints and facts, instructions and observations, creating different paths – back and forth - in a playful way.
In Framed Flexion, Lena Wurz explores her creative process by mapping her thoughts and transporting them into different papers and supports, as we can see in the series PREPARING TO WALK (four brown prints), Count your steps until your thoughts interrupt (big folded cut prints), hacia/desde (a series of A4 prints pinned to the wall), the big wood dice piece Find a _____ and her sound piece Toe Lines.
Linked and displayed across the exhibition, her body of work invites the audience - whose experience is at the heart of the artist’s work – to become active participants by entering a non-linear game through a playful, instructing and reflecting language.

Curated by Nectar co-founders Tai Lomas & Olga Sureda