Edwin Monsalve y Fredy Alzate. "Orbs and Radicles"

The Fernando Pradilla gallery presents the exhibition Orbes y Radicantes [Orbs and Radicles], a joint proposal by the Colombian artists Edwin Monsalve (Medellín, 1984) and Fredy Alzate (Antioquia, 1975). Both projects convey notions of an interpreted landscape in their questions concerning the material nature that constitute these two places of interrogation. On the one hand, Orbs derive from fictional images of the world, produced with materials such as coal, petrol, marble, and stones collected in urban environments, and, on the other, Radicantes, where cement and brick allude to the constructive typologies of the outskirts of Latin-American cities.

Both artists adopt cartography as a model of critical thinking where a set of intersections and escape routes rise out of representative and abstract notions of the universe and the urban realm. The space where the forms of Edwin Monsalve hang mid-air provide a contrast with the horizon under which, by sheer gravitational force, the sculptures of Fredy Alzate are installed, positing a plane of coexistence between oppositions. Thus, the problematics and interests of these artists consist in ciphering subjective narratives which forge possible universes, sets of reference with the conceptions of the micro and the macro facets of human existence. The conjunction of geology and astronomy bonds sky and earth, and permits the elevation of simple objects and found and gathered materials to the aesthetic plane which, in their translation to this new context are charged with validity and create different typological typographies. Subtraction by constant material friction reframes the cyclical gesture which connects the final form with its natural origin.

Orbes, by Edwin Monsalve, stems out of a continuous and attentive contemplation of what the concept of landscape entails. The spheres present in the exhibition allude to the stars and seem to have been fortuitously ripped out of everyday geographies; they are found rocks extracted from natural or urban environments. Orbes renovates the gesture from practices derived from the scientific method, uniting forms of seeing and classifying, which serve to describe the origin of everything, including the heterogeneous forms of nature itself. At the same time, they remember a diagram of the night sky, as in the work Infinitos [Infinites], made up of points on a galaxy far away.

Edwin Monsalve lives and works in Medellín. In 2017 he was given the Premio Adquisición EFG Latin American Art Award in association with ArtNexus, one of the most relevant recognitions for the support of visual art productions in the contemporary Latin American landscape. His work has been exhibited in a variety of Colombian institutions and museums, among which we can highlight the Art Museum of the Banco de la República in Bogotá, the Museum of Antioquia in Medellín, and the Gilberto Álzate Avendaño Foundation in Bogotá, where in 2016 he presented his site-specific project Narcissus, which was awarded the 4th Edition of the Plastic and Visual Arts Biennial Prize. In 2020 he was invited by the curator Juan Canela to produce a solo project for the edition of ZONA MACO SUR 2020; presenting the project Estructuras de poder [Structures of Power] (2019-2020). He currently teaches at the University of Antioquia.

In its turn, the project Radicantes, by Fredy Alzate, puts forth an open narrative about the heterogeneous and interdependent structures that stem out of a contemplation of urban phenomena and the way man intervenes in nature, by way of a narrative that is based on the abstraction of forms, though it retains references to the contexts where these materials come from. In the words of Nicolas Bourriaud, it is about recognizing and traversing various territories, evaluating the installation of a nomadic subject which lays roots and constructs new significations in other spaces.

The itineraries, product of the crossing of signs present in the different researches and creative processes of Alzate, express precarious and contingent situations which stand for modes of dwelling and strategies of subsistence in the sprawling cities of Latin-America, but they also reveal the configuration of subjectivities and even urban paradoxes, in the middle of the vagrant and undisciplined forms of its development.

Fredy Alzate lives and works in Medellín; he read a BA in Visual Arts from the University of Antioquia (2000) and an MFA in Artistic Production from the National University of Bogotá (2006). Since 1998 he exhibits solo and collectively, and his distinctions include the Pasantía, UCLM, Cuenca, Spain (1998); the first award at the XIX Salón Arturo y Rebeca Rabinovich, MAMM (1999); a grant for Creation in Sculpture from the City Hall of Medellín, and a nomination to the VII Luis Caballero Award, Bogotá (2012); the award for the artistic residence in the Maison Des Arts Georges Pompidou, in Cajac, France (2013); winner of the program CIFO’s Grants & Commissions: Mid-Career artist. Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, the creation grant for artists of long trajectory, Estímulos a la Culture, City Hall of Medellín (2017); and winner of the contest for public sculpture, Medellín a Cielo Abierto [Medellín, Open Sky] (2020). Freddy Alzate currently teaches at the Faculty of Art of the University of Antioquia, Colombia.

Fredy Alzate has participated in the exhibitions: Pangaea: New Art from Africa and Latin America, Saatchi Gallery, ¿Londres y Artistas comprometidos? Tal vez [London and Engaged Artists? Maybe] in the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (2014); La vorágine [The Maelstrom], Galería OMR México D.C: (2015); No Black, No White (No End) in CIFO, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami and the Open Art Biennial, Örebo, Sweden (2017).