Israel Galván & Pipo Hernández Rivero. Esquinitas / La Pastilla

August 4 - 26, 2023

Festival Internacional de Verano

Teatro Auditorio. San Lorenzo de El Escorial

An artistic installation resulting from the dialogue between the choreographer and dancer Israel Galván and the visual artist Pipo Hernández Rivero.

The purpose of Esquinitas / La Pastilla is to give form to the absence of the dancer, thanks to the interlocution between a vibrant sound grid and the round surface that Galván used in his celebrated piece Arena. On the stage, a drum is hidden among piled-up playground structures; and above it, a vibrator that activates a disturbing roll on the snare drum, which extends in time, awaiting the entrance of the performer.

The installation is made up of a floor that both artists re-signify by bringing it into the museum environment. This platform was rescued from the sands of the Real Plaza de Toros de La Maestranza in Seville, where Israel Galván gave what was the first performance by a dancer in this bullring. This floor is for Galván something more than a drum, something more than a scenic element. For Hernández it is fetishised matter, possessing multiple symbolic possibilities.

The piece is completed by a structure made up of stacked cupular playgrounds. Useless and with their disjointed slides, they seem to invite suicidal descents. They form a place in which the inoperative, the imagination and the repetitive make the expectation of innocent play coexist with its own impossibility. These slides, in turn sharing the stage with a vibrator —the adult toy par excellence— round off the complex web of materialities and crossed symbologies that seek to haunt the ghosts of childhood and adulthood, which are none other than those of expectations and limits. Contained in the same arena, they are summoned to maintain a certain eroticism of waiting.

Pipo Hernández Rivero

His artistic work traverses the territory of suspicion and opacity. Circling the complexity of the possibilities of painting in the 21st century, he offers a critical reconsideration of the pictorial with references to the failure of the cultural avant-garde. He has exhibited at CAAM, Canary Islands; Museo de Arte de Pereira, Colombia; Fundación Marso, Mexico City; ARTIUM, Vitoria-Gasteiz; Centro de Arte La Recova, Ermita del Gran Poder and Círculo de Bellas Artes, Tenerife, Fundación Otazu, Pamplona, Budapest Art Museum, Prague Art Museum and the Sala de Arte Contemporáneo de Tenerife. He has also participated in the Biennial of the Canary Islands and the Havana Biennial.

Israel Galván

A choreographer and flamenco dancer, he began dancing at the age of just three with his parents, José Galván and Eugenia de los Reyes. His expressive language is radically personal and is based on an intense revision of flamenco and its possibilities to fertilise and at the same time fertilise aesthetic territories. His boldness and efforts to renew have been rewarded, among others, with three Max Awards in 2014, the Premio Nacional de Danza 2005, two Bessies Awards, the New York Bessie Performance Award, National Dance Award for Exceptional Artistry (UK). In 2016 he was promoted to Officier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de France.

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