This year, the second edition of the Local Environments programme will take place, in which the work of 8 artists with links to the province of Alava or the Basque Country will be presented. This competition, created with the idea of strengthening the artistic context in Vitoria-Gasteiz, reflects just one of the many visions that make up our cultural environment. The exhibition involves a choice, which we consider to be perilous.

From proposals based on purely conceptual structures to the most formal approaches, none of the works present in the exhibition seeks to maintain a stable structure in its proposals but expresses the hope of finding new communication spaces, new relationships between thought and the resulting object.

North Gallery
From June 6 to September 17, 2006

Héctor Orruño, Miriam Isasi, Ana Lezeta and the couple, Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum are the Alava-based authors who will be accompanied by four artists from their environment: Karmelo Bermejo, Javier Soto, Zigor Barayazarra and the Navarre-born Fermín Jiménez.

For none of these artists does their presence in ARTIUM signify having reached a goal, nor has it even defined a way forward in their careers. Presumably they will continue alternating between the initiation of new discourses and bouts of indecision and creative crises This is where the programme seeks to have an effect, by helping to consolidate and daring proposals, fostering efforts to abandon overfamiliar statements and already explored territories, converting these into the function and criterion for the selection of the works exhibited here.

Apparently, there is no single quality representative of all their proposals. However, in a visit to the exhibition one senses that there are a number of common features that might be representative of one of the peculiarities of our emerging art.

Based on painted works, documentation in video and photography, the staging of works or the final installation present in the gallery, each one of these seems to have renounced the presentation of objects in order to be integrated in a broader context, inhabiting a space. Although each artistic piece is included in the exhibition in its own right, it is shown, in an effort to treat each of these equally, as one element of a specific reality.

Thus, the paint brims over the canvas, merges into the wall and becomes architecture or text, sculpture forgets its pedestal as it expands and accumulates, photography appears like the conceptual remains of an action, and the only work that is complete in itself, is something as intangible as the projection of a video.

All of these things lead us to believe that there is a need, conscious or not, to keep the work of the artists away from the idea of being a unique act of genius, and which requires a contact with reality in order to preserve the specific reference, by example of their social, political or personal environment.

In this way, Héctor Orruño will create with his paintings vital spaces set in the near future, with aesthetics transferred from nanotechnology and science-fiction comics, while maintaining a direct contact with painting, the studio and manual work.

For his part, a review of recent conceptual proposals allows Karmelo Bermejo to deal with our cultural, political and economic models in an ironic manner, by creating contradictory feelings in the spectator about current issues. In the gallery, these take the specific form of the documentation for these actions. Ana Lezeta, for her part, proposes a video piece, the most poetic work in the exhibition. Without any sound to disturb the image, she creates a visual kaleidoscope through the continuous movement of the encounters and separations of 7 actors. Her work refers us to the often-cyclical world of feelings, of human relations.

The proposal of both Miriam Isasi and Javi Soto explore intimate spaces, which, through different languages, add to their work an acid, and irreverent aura, which is arider in the case of Javier and more introspective in the case of Miriam. Their respective interventions are saturated with colour and seek, in both cases, to draw the attention of a possible spectator.

In turn, with a more formalist language, Zigor Barayazarra will allude to the socialisation of human beings and their immersion in the inhabited space. Through an analysis of the signs all around us, publicity hoardings and traffic signs, he will propose confrontations, poetically and ironically, with other natural models. In his work, Fermín Jiménez uses issues that concern us on a daily basis and that are converted into drawings, installations, photographs or videos. A multidisciplinary artist, he peppers the space with ideas in an uninhibited manner, converting this into his workshop or home. Playful, critical and fresh, the process becomes the script for his work, revealing an optimistic vision in his practice as an artist.

The exhibition ends with the proposal of the group formed by Iratxe Jaio and Klaas von Gorkun. One installation, Meanwhile, In the Living Room... introduces as to a previous action performed in Holland under the same title. Based on the representation of a living room, covered with the blue chroma key background used on TV for superimposing images, the artists place us between two worlds, the real world and the representative world, transferring meanings from one to the other in a study of social behaviour.

This is, in short, ARTIUM's way of acknowledging the force and commitment of these artistic careers that have just begun.