March 1, 2006 to April 26, 2006

Richard Garet - artist statement

Leonor Mendoza - artist statement

Perla Krauze

Antuan

ABOUT THE SHOW:

Hardcore Art has been created with a new art vocabulary within the complex currents of Contemporary Art. Based on this concept, the work of four artists will be exhibited at Hardcore Art Contemporary Space (HACS), opening March 1st, 2006. The four shows are based on the new aesthetic category of "new activism" (J. Sans, Hardcore: New Activism", Palais de Tokio, Paris, 2003). Each of the artists, points out crucial issues in contemporary society, and aligns them on ideological statements through out subtle metanarratives and metaphors. HACS's second show scopes four different levels of art expressions. Antuan inquires into crucial human issues. His photographs and installations reflect post-human entities as subversive metanarratives conjuring desire, orality, sexuality, and the devouring of the Self. Through weird metamorphoses and hybrid mutation, his images function as a rhetoric for social violence and human antagonism. Richard Garet creates on new media, where sound and virtual images meet; and time, space and appropriation lose their limits. His three visual and sound installations revolve around pure intangible images, juxtaposed with one another over an imperceptible continuum of a non-narrative screen. Mixed sounds spread over the senses of the spectator in an abstract "numerique" combination of tones and noises. Perla Krauze's Enchanted Garden (2006) is an in-site installation located in the outdoors of the gallery. This installation forms an enclosed garden with artificial flowers and plants. Krauze reflects on nature opposing the natural and the artificial world. This enclosed "path" of greens and colorful "flowers" proposes a sub textual desire to reconstitute the original paradise or a roussonian get back to a bucolic world. The participants silently experience the "beauty" of this sort of Babylonian garden, in a subtle contradiction between the real and the simulacrum. Leonor Mendoza's photographs play on the limits of women's condition. Her digital works show gigantic close-ups of the women's body. She alludes to femininity and its crucial edges. Each photograph, with its telluric feminine icon, is mediated, intercrossed, or intervened by an aggressive instrument that functions as a metonymic artifact of gender violence and aggression