Throughout the history of mankind artists have been able to endow their works with symbolic meanings so when associated with images ideas or concepts by those who observe them they can find in them a metaphysical dimension.

For many years these polysemic symbols the result of the conjunction of image and psyche have not lost importance for humanity being art a significant channel to understand the deepest essence of the modern individual; however some new creators express the human condition through aesthetic, compositional and linguistic “winks” instead of gestures and mimesis of their personal universe or of the human race.

But how can we situate the artwork in a nihilistic habitat and think that it owes its strength to the lack of sense of the reality we live in? While Carl Gustav Jung proposed as a key the archetypal understanding of images: those ancestral, autonomous iconographies basic constituents of the collective unconscious which should be understood by different generations; “MODERN ARCHETYPES“, the new exhibition at GALERIA AZUR MADRID, inquires about the imminent distance that Western society and therefore its culture is proposing from that conception of archetypes.

The playful combinations of pure forms, materials, abstractions, colors and surfaces outline a world in which the human condition can be observed from a new perspective. The artists of this exhibition try to express themselves by leaving behind the traditional figurative pictorial styles that tried to represent the subconscious giving primacy most of the time to the content over the form in order to approach their archetype by constantly pursuing its shadow. 

As for the dualistic principles present in this selection of works – interior and exterior, realism and representation, light and shadow, certainty and risk, image and morpheme, dimension without dimensions – determine the particular universe of the exhibition, while tending to disorient the viewer and exploit the tension created by the opposites, generating a new fragmented and reductionist vision, sophisticated and ironic.

In this way, “Modern Archetypes” imposes itself as food for critical minds, questioning the viewer/reader of works, and those who awaken interest in the power of the image over the psyche.

Ceres González. Art Curator and Critic. GALERIA AZUR MADRID

Artworks