Opening Section selected by Övül Durmuşoğlu and Julia Morandeira

“The ancestors appear at the threshold of consciousness. They envelop dreams and imagination with their presence to ask questions, transmit knowledge and peel back the thousand and one skins of our identity. They visit us in the most familiar ways or through inexplicable phenomena, piquing our curiosity and our loyalty. They are the stars of the night sky of our unknown, whose light shines and travels for billions of years. They convey the rhythmic and vibratory structures of the cosmos, and their underlying harmony. Insightful, strange, prophetic, they are the legendary Ancients, the Immortals who belong to the past, to the time of dreams, to the primordial “time out of time”; and yet they never forget to encroach upon the present and the future, to the point of altering the innate dispositions of their descendants and participating in ordinary affairs.”

– By The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS)

For its first participation in Arco Madrid, the Foco Gallery proposes “Through the Eyes of my Ancestors”, a solo show by the French artist Pauline Guerrier. Presented exclusively at the fair, the artist reveals a project on memory through a series of works mixing tapestries, sculptures and drawings.

It is a work about transmission. The artist questions her heritage, and when she wonders what her ancestors have passed on to her, she naturally thinks of shapes and colors.
Pauline Guerrier is indeed from a family of artists: she counts among them painters, sculptors and ceramists. They appear in this tribute through symbolic representations, evoking values implied to the artist by simple things of life: senses, like sight and touch among others.

For this project, fantasized images with dreamlike character, are then projected on the material in an instinctive way. The series appears like a tarot card game, where each work brings its own symbolism between the past, the present and the future.
The sculptures in the same way, taking the shapes of the tapestries, leave the canvas to settle in the three-dimensional space.

Constantly in search of artisanal techniques, Pauline Guerrier works and impregnates herself with the material and her body. She extends her knowledge and does not hesitate to push the limits to satisfy her need to explore.