For the second consecutive year, the ProArte Foundation is present at the Hybrid Art Fair. Its commitment to emerging artists and their visibility in the international context aligns with the fair’s objectives of disrupting the art world with challenging practices. This year, the work of four young artists is being showcased: three Ecuadorians and one Spaniard. From the equatorial line come Marcela Silvestre, Ray Medina, and Josué Rodríguez, while from the “old” world, we have Judith Peris Gatell.

Judith explores painting and drawing with various materials. Her small-format works engage in an energetic conversation with tradition, the surrounding world, and nature. The mediums she uses (wood, paper, canvas, or clay) come alive to flirt with convention, which, in orphic forms, gradually fragments faces, bodies, and trees. The curiosity in each title intertwines with an interdisciplinary practice that draws from a variety of methods. Gems, inks, wax, and gold leaf conspire with new technologies to carry out her visual explorations. Her work, currently in full bloom, expands and redefines itself within its unique horizon.

Ray Medina, on the other hand, draws from a pictorial tradition that crystallized at the dawn of the avant-garde. He reinterprets expressionism with a light-heartedness that borders on irony. In this series, Punchline, he elevates painting into the world of Rap. The dialogue between music and painting, a subject already explored by Kandinsky through his intrinsic notion of high culture, now lands in popular culture and the extremes of urban experience through Ray’s hands.

His painting packs a punch. A sublime hit to the eye, an explosion of smudges, sounds, and colors that transforms improvisation into a method. From the “punchline” of Freestyle to the deliberate bareness of his artistic resources, enigmatic characters, exotic pets, and vintage images are arranged in unprecedented ways within his compositions. Ray manages to make the most difficult seem effortless: painting as both the beginning and end of almost everything.

In contrast, Josué Rodríguez elevates the everyday to a reflective level. Drawing on universal philosophical and poetic references, he makes life’s journey, the daily walk, and the chance encounter with ordinary men his creative spice. He is an ethnographer of the line. He maps the ephemeral and human physiognomy, collecting texts and subjects. In this series, Boxing Conditions, he recreates characters such as Relojito, Estrellita, Pechuga, and Mostrito, turning them into survivors of both boxing and life. These caricatured figures play poor roles on poor paper.

Josué paints thoughts, thinks while drawing, and draws by naming. In this series, he uses fragile sheets from the old Ecuadorian postal building to construct narratives from discarded memories. The paper, an unstable medium, reveals, through the image’s creation, bodies and small stories that were never told. As the artist himself states: “It’s about remembering, listing, and sketching continuously each character, each fragment of the body, each little word is a final round, and POOM POOM: Down goes the puppet.”

From that frayed place of scraps and cotton emerges the work of Marcela Silvestre. Her work weaves narratives that cross between eroticism, design, and fashion. Tinderella, a kind of jumping archetype that inhabits her works, is a Cinderella of the Tinder era, overflowing (and embroidering) her zones of desire and intimacy among humans. Her pop representation takes advantage of technological devices and a variety of two-dimensional procedures such as drawing, collage, thread, or ink, to immerse us in an experience of seduction and conquest.

The “Tinderization” of her proposal goes beyond any factual sense. It’s a flight; a persuasive and witty leitmotif that appears in the work to unleash unexpected mutations. Tinderella structures the narrative of Marcela’s work while simultaneously destabilizing it. In the pieces, she changes, never having the same face. Her body transforms, escaping any gender, ready for enjoyment, pleasure, and endless delight. She is a chameleon—she could be him, you, or me; (she) plays and interacts with the viewer. There’s her number, waiting for you to call.

– Saidel Brito