Juan Antonio & Margarita Monsalve: “Vértigo”

October 15 – November 14 of 2009

It is a pleasure for Casas Riegner to present: “Vértigo”, the new show by artists Juan Antonio and Margarita Monsalve, which explores instants of movement contained in images.
This new series of work develops on the pulse of the reality we inhabit, where the speed of changes in the images we see has blended into our perception and into the rythms with which we navigate the world.

The artists point to our contemporary assimiliation of acceleration, visual simultaneity and its effect of instability and weightlessness over our bodies, as a normalized state of being, beyond the physiological alterations they might produce.
They make us think about vertigo being a stimulant for the senses.

In this attempt to contain vertigo in form, the materials used in the assemblages of the pieces become versatile and malleable in order to reproduce this sensation.
Different instants accumulate in a space in time: a lightbox contains, as a small universe, multiple layers of translucid photographs, partially exposed in the darkroom, which by their careful disposition, widen the depth of field of the image.

With the wandering of our gaze through the different elements of the images, we enter a game of perception that alludes to phantasmagoria, to the fragmentation of memory and that makes evident our own inevitable intervention at the moment of observing and therefore, recreating, memories.
In this case, somebody else’s memories.

Photographer and architect Juan Antonio Monsalve and visual artist Margarita Monsalve have united their visions on the city and photography as artistic language, working as a team since 1999.
Their work has been shown at the Museo de Arte de la Unversidad Nacional, at the Myto gallery in México City and at Glería Segovia in Barcelona, among others. In 2007 their project “La Càmara Lúcida ” was exhibited at Casas Riegner.