ORIGEN

With great anticipation, we are pleased to present the first solo sculpture exhibition of Colombian artist Gustavo Vélez in Lima. With this exhibition, Vélez returns after 20 years, as indicated by the title of the show, "Origen" (Origin), to the beginnings or starting point of his abstract work, specifically with the sculpture series called "Hipercúbicos" (Hypercubes). "It was the year 1997, and in my studio at Laboratorios Palla in Pietrasanta, Italy, I was playing with the projections that rays of light drew on the marble. There, restless and in search of form, began my transition from figurative to abstract. A block of marble extracted from the quarries of Michelangelo Buonarroti awaited me. It was in that perfect cube of Statuario marble from Carrara where I sculpted 'Hipercúbicos,' my first abstract work in this material." - Gustavo Vélez, April 2018 The current exhibition presented at Enlace Arte Contemporáneo Gallery in Lima, Peru, consists of 17 works crafted in white marble and gray Bardiglio marble from Carrara, black marble from Belgium, bronze, and steel, in medium and large formats. In this series of works that make up the current exhibition, we can find the artist's conjectures about geometric properties and their progression, particularly those of the cube: its folding and super-folding, resembling origami exercises in marble. All of this is treated purely sensibly, in the etymological meaning of the Greek word "aisthesis": sensation, self-knowledge of the senses obtained through experience, hence the aesthetic. It is about intuitions of space, its possibilities, properties, and plastic expressions developed. In Vélez's works, we see an exercise of (self)-didactic schematics in the development of proportional practices, schemes with determined orders of construction and development. The series of our exhibition, "Origen," is based on the cube, which is a prism with the unique property of being able to be divided into three equal and similar pyramids, which does not happen with any other type of prism. We can feel this in several of his works, whether he works with volume or space, through the material he removes, which allows for airiness. It is that singularity that allows Gustavo Vélez to intuitively follow his sensitive and affective mental meanderings and create those organic undulations that combine matter and light, emptiness and shadows. He skillfully takes advantage of the elements of the cube: face, edge, vertex, diagonal, and center to create, in his free affective play of pure forms of sensibility, a work charged with sensuality and even subtle eroticism, founded on a solid reality of geometric proportions. Rigor and subtly blended sensitivity bring us closer to a dreamlike work, the illusion of art erecting a world with reality in a space finally glimpsed in four dimensions, in the closed, compact, and convex figure of the Hypercube, which we would intuitively imagine as a cube displaced (or phased) in time, a cube that we are not allowed to see or experience as such due to our particular constitution apparently perceiving only three dimensions. Gustavo Vélez, thank you for allowing us to emotionally grasp and enjoy this. You bring it into presence (that's also what art is), to make it emerge, erect, bring it into presence and feel it... that is ultimately what it is all about.