DUPLEX was born from the desire to create an independent space, to serve as a platform for emerging artists born mainly in the 80s/90s.  As often happens with artist-run-spaces, DUPLEX feeds on the desire to explore different territories and practices – in this case, territories that often go beyond the boundaries of individual projects and gradually open up to the intertwining of perspectives on art and their praxis, in a movement similar to what can be observed in the daily functioning of our studios and artistic residence, where artists often share in community, strengthening individual work. 

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The exhibition “TAKING THE LIGHT OUT OF THE PRISM”, aims to value the strength of diverse and even paradoxical singularities that, in a spirit of collaboration, manage to generate a common dynamic, where the power of one or the power of many are not mutually exclusive.  

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As in a glass prism, the intention is to simultaneously value the cohesive energy (which passes through the surface of the glass), and the magnified intensity of the individual forces (which emanate from the prism in the form of different wavelengths). 

Values such as intersubjectivity, coexistence, permeability, community and unity/multiplicity are the original core of this exhibition, which is pragmatically organized into 5 nuclei of possible aesthetic and conceptual proximities, which are not watertight:

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PAVILION I

ABOVE EARTH, BELOW WATER AND ALL THE STORIES IN BETWEEN 

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The first nucleus contemplates narrative possibilities, conveyed to a wide spectrum of origins. Oral and community tradition, cartography, magic, fiction and fantasy, individual mythologies and fables of an unfathomable future, communicate through an imaginary that finds its crossing points in the four natural elements (water, earth, fire and air) and in a notion of a pulsating embryonic beginning - of life, of alternative realities and discourses or even of materialized virtual spaces.

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PAVILION II

WHEN PLAYFULNESS AND ABSURDITY WALK INTO A BAR

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At the beginning of the second pavilion, we welcome works that, due to their playful and proveocatory nature, challenge the use of a common plan of communication and understanding, throwing the viewer into a search for new meanings and references, making use of games of scale, language and color.

Sometimes containing a latent humor, the present works criticize in a sharp and acute manner the way we dedicate ourselves to leisure or rest activities, constitutive of the human need, questioning and/or legitimizing its importance, highlighting some ironies and perversions.

PAVILION II

GRIDS AND ECHOES OF LOST STRUCTURES

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The second part of this second exhibition space brings together a set of works that explore a sense of loss of a place, a structure, or a previous state of affirmation and cohesion.  A latent melancholy underlies them, a discovery of a space or state "in between", of something that has collapsed, disappeared or evaporated.

The grid, as a counterpoint, even if destroyed, it is stated as the anchor to the desire for some rationality and certainty - perhaps a predictability - that has been lost or interrupted.

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PAVILION III

SPIRITUALITY AND NATURE'S DRIFTS 

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Pavilion three begins with works that embody in their materiality or conceptualization an approach to the natural environment. The artist's need for wandering, in the form of a path or journey, either physical or mental, results in different gestures that aim to encapsulate nature, appropriate it or construct a language that arises from drift, from the primitive need to do things in movement, of harmony with an ecosystem or the fascination of its observation (translating it into an almost scientific rigor or, paradoxically, a fictional, totemic or spiritual construction).

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PAVILION III

THE BODY AND THE OTHER BATTLEGROUNDS

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The exhibition ends with a set of works that simultaneously explore the notion of the body as territory and instrument of conflict, nonconformity, dysfunction and recreation and the body as a presence that asserts itself through absence.

The body that cannot be seen, through disappearance or fragmentation, becomes a reference, a metaphor, an action or a vehicle for reconceptualizing its limits, nature and function, conceiving (also) its total annihilation.

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