Moon, she said...

Kunstraum am Schauplatz is thrilled to invite you to the opening of Moon, she said… this equinox, March 20th, from 6 to 9 p.m.
The exhibition includes works by Paulina Semkowicz, Michi Lukas, Hugo Canoilas, and stones and minerals from Lukas’s ancestors’ collection.

She read her fortune cookie silently: “In the beginning, the woman was truly the sun—an authentic person. Now she is the wan and sickly Moon, dependent on another, reflecting another’s brilliance.” [1]
Maybe fate was not pleasant to her. Perhaps gaining awareness was. Embracing gravity’s fate meant understanding gravity as the mother of physical and emotional relations. After all, gravity can be understood within our bodies.

Kenji[2] showed me the Moon. It was in a ball of noodles soup with an egg suspended in it.
As the projection of the Moon on the water’s surface, the mother of painting and poetry aims to suspend or surpass gravity, providing a particular time, slower than usual.
With such time, you glimpse the white circle projected on the calm water. Silence allows you to hear your heartbeat.

Painting the Moon, it’s embracing it, going beyond representation and control.
In a similar way, the works presented in the exhibition hold this perspective, not looking at but acting like nature [3] .
On the horizontal plane, paint is applied in a mesh of actions from process-based abstraction towards a reaction or freedom from systems of representation.

Starting these singular relations, that of collaboration between the artists and painting, towards a mimetic relation with nature, wherein a microscopic lenses and long length of time, pigments and chemical or natural binders, water, and the filaments of fabric produce forms, guide them to an object outside us, that we, with our elastic capacity, enlarge our senses and embody it as ours.

Moon, she said… gathers works that explore those attraction forces within Earth toward the Moon by unfolding micro perspectives, fictions, cosmological and spiritual readings of the unknown.

[1] In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun (1955), the autobiography of Japanese feminist writer Hiratsuka Raichō, quoted from 湾と病弱な月 by Chus Martínez; Flash Art online; February 26th, 2024.
[2] Kenji Ide’s performance at the opening of the exhibition YUGEN / Tsukimi
with kenji Ide and Jirit Kovanda, curated by XYZ Collective at Guimarães https://www.guimaraes.info/yugen-tsukimi.html
[3] Chus Martínez; 湾と病弱な月, Flash Art online; 26 February 2024.