Nicolás Lisardo. Forlandia, 2021. Courtesy of Manuel Ojeda Gallery
MANUEL OJEDA GALLERY PARTICIPATES AT ART MADRID WITH ARTIST NICOLÁS LISARDO
ART MADRID. Booth A13
The Galería de Cristal of the Palacio de Cibeles
Madrid. 22nd - 26th February, 2023
The Manuel Ojeda gallery, based in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain), will dedicate its space at the Art Madrid contemporary art fair to the artistic proposal of Nicolás Lisardo.
The Bronx in New York is installed in the collective imagination as a metaphor for an impoverished and highly conflictive place. The artist Nicolás Lisardo uses it in his proposal to tell us about a personal experience in another place: in the Poble Nou neighbourhood of Barcelona. This was his own particular Bronx, the place where he founded a sensibility for the degradation and death of the urban environment.
Nicolás Lisardo. Forlandia, detail, 2021. Courtesy of Manuel Ojeda Gallery
The impulse behind the works by Lisardo that the Manuel Ojeda gallery will present at Art Madrid is the desire to deconstruct one's own experience, so that the artist can understand what might have been the mistakes made in the past.
His work projects an introspective look at the disappointments, the moral defeats, the broken dreams, the boredom that this artist lives and shares with his contemporaries. For this reason, he is interested in the ruins, the debris, the abandoned, both in a factory neighbourhood in Barcelona and in the heart of our society.
But Lisardo also speaks to us of how these buildings and urban spaces recreate the existential emptiness that constricts the society of our century. In his works he stages an exacerbated critique of everything that makes up the material dimension of our experience. Because our society is less and less aware of the metaphysical relationship that envelops it.
Nicolás Lisardo. Bronx I and II, 2021. Courtesy of Manuel Ojeda Gallery
ABOUT NICOLÁS LISARDO
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1981. He studied Interior Design and Design Culture at the Escola de Art y Disseny EINA (Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona). These years of academic training are used by the artist to forge a critical vision of society from its form and artifice, from where he proposes new alternatives centred on nomadism for an architecture that he considers obsolete, alienating and decadent. At the same time, he immerses himself in counterculture, developing an extensive trajectory in the discipline of graffiti, which further strengthens this critical and performative vision from the marginality of this discipline within the clandestine and subversive action of a necessary social uprooting.
After fifteen years of militancy, he decided to take the step to the exhibition scene with Manuel Ojeda, with whom he soon forged a relationship that redirected his attitudes and capacities towards the consolidation of a personal style that he called neodramatism.
He is currently a teacher at the Escuela de Arte y Superior de Diseño de Gran Canaria (School of Art and Design of Gran Canaria). He carries out research that is not only limited to artistic and aesthetic creation, but also aims to achieve the consummation of truth through knowledge from the praxis of design in different fields such as philosophy, sociology, anthropology and history.
MANUEL OJEDA GALLERY was founded in 1984 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Since then it has been dedicated to the promotion of contemporary art both locally, nationally and internationally, in a permanent open dialogue between different tendencies and artists from different places that are presented to the public in seven annual exhibitions.