Tide Line: CAM Collection

Soyon Jung</a> (b. 1982 in South Korea, lives in Hamburg) consists of six motifs that refer to the architectural motifs of the current European banknotes. The bridges from the back sides of the bills, in Jung's heliogravures are left to decay in dystopian sceneries.</p><p>According to the European Central Bank, Euro banknotes are “a tangible, visible symbol of European unity”. The fictitious bridge motifs on the reverse stand for understanding between people in Europe and between Europe and the rest of the world. The windows and gates on the front sides symbolize the European spirit of openness and cooperation. None of the architectural motifs pictured on the bills exist in real life; rather, they are abstract variations of architectural styles from various eras of European history. But their time is running out, because on November 29, 2023 – exactly one year ago – the ECB Governing Council decided to start the process of redesigning the banknotes. Based on a study on the preferences of people in the eurozone, the topics “European Culture” and “Rivers and birds” have been proposed as possible themes for the future banknotes. The final decision of the Governing Council is expected for 2026. One of the objectives of the Eurosystem's cash strategy is to develop banknotes which are more “attractive, relatable and inclusive for all Europeans”.</p><p>In this context, the following questions arise: Are the central ideas of European cooperation in today's banknotes outdated and no longer in line with the latest state of identity-creating monetary policy? Does our society need concrete subjects that depict reality to ensure that European individuals identify with the community? Does the ability of abstract thinking even disappear during subject-oriented banknote development processes? As a visible sign of the neglicence of public infrastructure, deteriorated bridges have connected the population in northern and southern Europe since the disaster in Genoa in 2018 (Polcevera Viaduct) to the most recent collapse of the Carola Bridge in Dresden on September 11, 2024. In times of debates about intra-European borders, cohesion and solidarity among Europe's countries and citizens seem to crumble. All these considerations can be made and extended based on Soyon Jung's images of broken bridges. Like ancient relics the decadence of time, the power of imagination and the beauty of the rudimentary manifest themselves in the ruinous state of the bridge debris. In the form of fictitious projections, these highly refined and meticulously elaborated works on paper preserve fragmented ideals of a common European system of values and ideas.</p><p><br></p>" />

work of Marco Franco</a> (Lisbon, 1972), something we could tacitly name radiation. Simultaneously austere and gentle, it is an aura that emanates from the work in various gestural and sonic digressions, despite its obvious inertia and muteness. Often related to his musical work, Franco’s plastic expression is syncopated by the musical memory that has accompanied the artist for over two decades, giving him a certain innate purity when it comes to transmuting a sonic idealisation into a visual realisation.</p><p>Many of these moments are revealed in Live Angle, the artist’s second exhibition at Galeria <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Tide-Line--CAM-Collection/"/Organization/Bruno-Murias/506052851CF1FB3B">Bruno Múrias</a>. Focused, in essence, on the unpredictable sculptural practice that Franco has been developing over the last two years, this set of objects presents the continuation of the artist’s rigorous research into the potential of geometric form. In addition to a sculptural approach strongly linked to a drawing practice (especially with regard to the possibility of transforming a two-dimensional plane into a sculptural one), the artist focuses here on reorganising the physical conditions of the surfaces he works on, giving them new figurative predispositions with each singular expression of a gesture.</p><p>Operating according to an abstract mathematical logic, these works radiate diffuse perceptions in terms of their exact formal assimilation, not only in terms of their uneasy internal behaviour — curves, tears and inflicted twists — but, above all, in terms of the question of which is the original body that supports them. All sculptures are variations of the same design, and all of them are triangular in shape. Whether scalene, rectangular or isosceles, each sturdy, stubborn triangle in iron (lacquered) or copper (oxidised) functions like a light, fragile sheet of paper that urgently needs to stand up despite its bodily inevitability. However, as this is a material with a memory that is deeply conditioned by its physical hardness in a solid state, it is precisely through a series of folding decisions — both intuitive and studied — that the artist informs a once flat body into a complex skeleton in terms of its volume and balance, with no natural possibility of correction.</p><p>We could also say that in these works lies a monumentality of hypothetical scale, almost as if they were black maquettes for large-scale sculptural objects (a possibility emphasised by the choice of exhibition devices, also designed by the artist). The dissimilarities they present — in their inner contours, in particular, and as a landscape, in general — are like meditative vibrations that create a trial, repetitive and accelerated pulse in the triangular axis that punctuates the exhibition. The minimalist reminiscences they bring together are the result of an accumulation of decisive and fleeting cuts, gestures that search inside for their own latent cellular noise. Absent of any figuration, it is through the symbolic strangeness of the sculptures that we observe the suggestion of volatile images and movements to their surrounding perception. Like a record spinning on a stereo, not only is its plastic shape altered as it rotates, but the echo it emits is transformed and multiplied.</p><p><br></p>" />