LOS ENCARGADOS

Santiago Sierrra, (Born in Madrid, 1966). 1989. Degree in Fine Arts, Universidad Complutense, Madrid, Spain. Workshop at Círculo de Bellas Artes, (J. G. Dokoupil), Madrid, Spain. 1989-1991 visiting student at Hochschule für Bildende Künste (FE Walter, BJ Blume and S. Brown), Hamburg, Germany. 1995-1997 Research Fellowship in the School of San Carlos, University of Mexico, Mexico City. His beginnings are linked to alternative art circuits in the capital of Spain—El Ojo Atómico, Espacio P—although he would go on to develop much of his career in Mexico (1995–2006) and Italy (2006–10), and his work has always exerted a great influence on artistic literature and criticism.

Sierra's oeuvre strives to reveal the perverse networks of power that inspire the alienation and exploitation of workers, the injustice of labour relations, the unequal distribution of wealth produced by capitalism, the deviance of work and money, and racial discrimination in a world scored with unidirectional (south–north) migratory flows.

Revisiting and updating certain strategies characterising the Minimalism, Conceptual and Performance Art of the seventies, Sierra interrupts flows of capital and godos (Obstruction of Freeway With a Truck’s Trailer, 1998; Person Obstructing a Line of Containers, 2009); he hires labourers to reveal their precarious circumstances (20 Workers in a Ship’s Hold, 2001); he explores the mechanisms of racial segregation derived from economic inequalities (Hiring and Arrangement of 30 Workers in Relation to Their Skin Color, 2002; Economical Study of The Skin of Caracans, 2006); and refutes the stories that legitimate a democracy based on state violence (Veterans of the Wars of Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Irak Facing the Corner, 2010–2; Los encargados, 2012).

Jorge Galindo, 1965, Madrid, lives and works in London, UK. Jorge Galindo considers that the decisive step in his training was his first contact with the art world at the Talleres de Arte Actual organised in Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid, in the framework of which his first exhibition was held in 1988. But even before then he had made the most important choice of all—painting would not be merely an expressive receptacle but a vital attitude. His oeuvre, characterised by a certain gestural abstraction and a persistent taste for large formats, reveals an obsession with collage that has ended up defining both his pictorial action and his understanding of images.

Galindo's early works explored material and tactile aspects rather than the actual grammar of plastic language. Through the use of canvas, burlap and waste material, sometimes even replacing cloth with boards, towels or blankets, the artist approached painting almost physically. Not all found materials, however, could whimsically become supports—only those that already possessed certain inherent plastic and chromatic qualities.

Iconographic references and visual registers would gradually make their way to his pictorial surfaces in what can be described as a sort of iconic phagocytosis. In this sense, his photomontages derived from calendars, old illustrated magazines or advertising and film journals reflect on the purity of the image and its realisation.

Act.>. 01/2013