Lorin Gallery presents Three Tenses of Contemporary, a group exhibition with Marc Badia, Edu Carrillo, and Fátima de Juan. On view from 22nd April to 20th May at Lorin Gallery’s downtown location, Three Tenses of Contemporary presents a visual examination of the notion of being contemporary, whose meaning is in flux and constantly being reshaped by our intervention.

Departing from and returning to the motifs ancient, classical but akin to our time, three participatory European artists compose with the symbols and visual languages specific to their culture, identities, and with a rhythm tuned to the singular pulse of the undefined time. This exhibition is in cooperation with L21 Gallery in Palma and Barcelona, Spain.

“We have never been modern”, the radical and unsettling claim by Bruno Latour, which later also became the title of his sociological monograph, serves as the pretext for Three Tenses of Contemporary. If we have never been modern, have we ever been contemporary? Paintings by the three artists respectively survey the emotional landscape, the conscious itinerary, and the gender spectrum in the private domain, which tries to answer what we are, and how we are as time-specific beings through different dimensions, and with different tenses.

Fátima de Juan, her exuberant, voluptuous, and offensive portrayal of femininity examines the theme prospectively with a futuristic combination and surrealistic color. Edu Carrillo, whose works sit at the heart of present tense, brings to us an honest, psychological portrayal of a contemporary mind. How to find a visual expression for absent-mindedness, for inaction, for the moments of brooding and incubating that has been wrongly associated with blankness? Finally, Marc Badia’s works explore the hermeneutics of images through painterly and installative practice. Taking on a retrospective view like archeologists and anthropologists, Marc Badia reorganizes, plays with, and experiments with the contemporary icons. He remolds the visual contents following the pattern of hip-hop acoustics, imitating a future mind trying to navigate through the diverse cultural traces we have left behind.

Fátima de Juan works with acrylic and spray paint to achieve a velvety texture. Fátima previously has worked on graffiti and mural works under the alias “Xena!”, an emphatic, powerful name resonates with the Amazonian, defiant woman warrior constantly occupying the central of her work. Presented in the exhibition is a series of close-up portraits based on the previous full-body delineation of the woman. Her exuberant, canal lips, the unabashed female traits are placed in juxtaposition with the counterarguments of brute strength. Sweetness, mystery, thug, and intimidating physicality co-exist in the fictional figure of Fátima’s own device. Natural, exotic, dramatic, primitive, naïve, vicious, tropical, ancestral.

Fátima de Juan creates a female imagery that embodies the infinite dialectics, and its reproductivity of aesthetic paradox refreshes the understanding of contemporary gender spectrum. Before receiving her art education in School of Arts and Crafts in Palma and Madrid, Fátima has already gained recognition in graffiti and murals, an artistic field that still has a male-dominated demography and visual discourse. The bold, aggressive expressions in graffiti are more frequently associated with masculinity, and the painting environment – the public space up to recognized neighborhood and down to sketchy corners – are traditionally seen as the ground for male artists. In this context, Fátima’s entrance into the genre with an ostensible female perspective and a woman warrior figure is bold, revolutionary and ground-breaking. As a flâneuse, the female version of the Baudelairean city wanderer, Fátima claims for contemporary women the urban landscapes, not only as a venue to loiter around, but also a space to gain and show artistic agency.

Edu Carrillo, is an Asturias-based artist, graduated from the University of Salamanca in Fine Arts. Following his solo exhibition titled “Lazy Workaholic” at L21 Palma, Edu continues his exploration on the theme of contemporary consciousness and psychology. Procrastination, inaction, absent-mindedness, inattention, Edu focuses on portraying these seemingly blank mental stages. With fluid gesture, loose composition, the artist tries to give his images a fragile sensual repose as we would have in those resting mental stages. Having known and engaged with the active, feverish and highly energetic process of actual painting, Edu turns to its opposite side and uses this medium to emphasize creative potential embodied in the inaction prior to and throughout the actual action.

Knowing laziness is not enough, what matters is whether we are able to surrender ourselves completely to this radical inactivity. It is not as easy as it seems. There are very powerful conditioning factors that prevent that from happening…. Of course, inactivity is not the absence of activity, far from it. Laziness and inactivity are actions that involve devoting body and soul to doing something neither productive nor functional to consumption.

(Edu Carrillo)

Another distinguishable visual element in Edu’s painting is the colored dots. Different from the famous Yayoi Kusama dots, Edu’s dots are variants of gomets –the small stickers used in galleries to indicate the availability of work. Edu’s playful use of the gomets has cast a self-reflective and nostalgic eye to the initial, childish contact with painting. Through sprinkling the symbols of creative motion on top of the layer underneath, Edu complicates the seriousness, contemplativeness of the fine art context, as well as expands the sources of contemporary visual language beyond its categorical limits.

Also contributing to the discussion of contemporary private life is Marc Badia’s humorous, challenging, and uneasy metamorphosis of daily scenes. The balloon-headed subject is seen in ridiculous behaviors or in saggy, laissez-faire moments. In “The world ended, it’s ok to be yourself again”, we see the subject feasting elegantly on a sneaker. Circumscribing the scenes is the frame that combines the classical, solemn arc covered by ivy and foliage with the dock on a Mac PC. The unexpected combination of different genre, style and culture turns Marc’s work to a meticulously installed collage that culminates into an allegory for contemporaneity.

There is a perceptual distance between the Marc Badia and visual languages he commands. Just as if he did not have a full knowledge of the scene, as if he was looking retrospectively and conjecturing what it was like, his works are filled with a cautious uncertainty, a dubious hesitation. Marc Badia has hedged himself with a retrospective tense; he works like an archeologist that tries to put all the fragments together. And through this self-distancing, he brings onto the canvas an honest portrayal of the bizarreness, a contemporary cult that can only be permitted provided it was from the past.

Marc Badia (born in 1984) now lives and works in Barcelona. He holds a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona, where he studied a master’s degree in Artistic Production and Research, and is an exchange student at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg. Marc Badia has exhibited at Centro del Carmen de Valencia (Valencia), Espositivo Mad (Ma- drid), Galería Fran Reus (Mallorca), La Capella (Barcelona), Fundación Arranz Bravo (Barcelona) and at Arco Madrid with the L21 gallery (Mallorca). He has held residencies at the Free University of Tbilisi (Georgia), the DE Kaaij festival (Nijmegen, Holland) and Major 28 (Lleida).

Fátima de Juan (Palma de Mallorca, 1984) is an artist based in Mallorca. Her first contact with the world of painting was through graffiti as a teenager under the alias “Xena”. Years later she studied Illustration at the School of Arts and Crafts in Palma and Graphic Design in Madrid. Her first solo exhibition “Pretty Thug” was at L21, Palma de Mallorca (2022). This year she will have solo shows at L21 Barcelona and WOAW, Hong Kong. Group exhibitions include “Stronger Than Language”, Galerie Romero Paprocki, Paris (2022); “Food Obsession”, Urvanity Projects and Gärna Art Gallery, Madrid (2022); “Portraits and monochromes”, ARTUAL, Lebanon (2022); “PED TALKS”,42 Art Space, Hong Kong (2022); “Exodus”, K11 Musea and Gallery Ascend, Hong Kong (2022); “Eating Sugar? No, papa!”, L21, Palma de Mallorca (2021); “Oh baby!”, Breach, Miami (2021). In 2023 Fátima will participate in group shows at L21, Palma de Mallorca; Allouche Gallery, Los Angeles; JPS Gallery, Hong Kong; etc.

Edu Carrillo (Santander, 1995) graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Sala- manca. He currently lives in Oviedo, Asturias. His work has been exhibited collectively at Da2, Salamanca (2017) and at Sala AVAM, Matadero, Madrid (2018). He has participated in ARCO Madrid 2022 and 2021, and at Untitled Art Fair in Miami. Recent exhibitions include “Saper vedere”, JPS Gallery, Tokyo (Japan, 2022); Atomic 101 Art, Shanghai (China, 2021); “Ambiguous Identity”, 42 Art Space, Beijing (China, 2021); “Eating Sugar? No, papa!”, L21 LAB, Palma de Mallorca (Spain, 2021) and the solo show “Hide the candies inside my hat”, L21 Gallery, Palma de Mallorca (Spain, 2021).