'Mirar no es tan fácil como parece', the exhibition can now be visited at the Espais d'Art Urbà in Benidorm

Since this Friday, the Espais d'Art Urbà network in Benidorm has been hosting just over fifty collages that make up the collective exhibition 'Looking is not as easy as it seems', the work of the artists Miriam Martínez Abellán, Susana Blasco and Erre Galvez. The exhibition, which can now be visited in different neighborhoods of the city, has been inaugurated by the acting mayor and councilor for Historical and Cultural Heritage, Ana Pellicer, who, together with the artists themselves, councilors of the municipal corporation, and other companions, has visited some of these exhibition spaces. “It is fortunate to have an exhibition like this in our city and, even more, that it is displayed in areas with so much traffic of people such as the Paseo de Poniente, the Pont, the Carrascos..., which will allow them to be contemplated by a lot of people,” the councilor highlighted.

In this sense, Ana Pellicer has stated that this exhibition "reinforces our commitment to turning Benidorm into an authentic open-air museum, bringing art closer to people and not the other way around", while explaining that, on this occasion, citizens and tourists will be able to contemplate “a variety of artistic proposals that start from the personal universe of three very different artists, but who agree that they are made with such a creative technique and that until now we had never exhibited in these spaces such as the of 'collage'”.

The Espai d’Art Urbà de Ponent collects the work of Miriam Martínez Abellán, a compendium of collages made up of 16 images and entitled “Inhabiting the ineffable”. In it, the artist invites us to leave the tangible to move through other possible spaces, where everyday contexts are diluted by the influence of dreams and metaphors. Martínez Abellán recreates places, where time and identity expand, through casual combinations of fragmented images, textures, and colors, mixing vintage cutouts with more current ones, which reflect those strangenesses where the word does not reach. A halo of magical surrealism along with messages of social commitment accompanies all of her work, from which pure visual poetry emerges.

The 18 images of 'Fugaces', 'Era', and 'Radiantes' by Susana Blasco have been placed in the Espais d'Art Urbà of Carrasco, Pont, and Hispanitat, three series made up of geometric collages that seek to explore memory, memories, oblivion, and women, through fragmentation, repetition, order and a very specific chromatic range around white and ocher, directly promoted by the material itself used: old photographs that are rescued from traces and, on occasions, from family albums or institutional archives. Here she presents her complete series ‘Fugaces’ (2021), composed of ten portraits made with found photographs of aspiring models from the 60s, complemented by three more collages from her series ‘Era’ (2022).

Within this group of images, some stand out that have been created especially for this exhibition by Susana Blasco and that occupy the Espai d'Art del Pont. The artist has taken part in a selection of photographs donated by the photographer Francisco Pérez Bayona, Quico, to the municipal archive of Benidorm, among them, the famous image of the French actress Pascale Petit sunbathing in a bikini. The intervention of these photographs has resulted in 'Radiantes': five analog collages in which the sun as a symbol, represented in different ways, becomes the transversal axis of the series.

Finally, in the Espais d'Art Urbà del Campo and Els Tolls, you can see the 19 images with which the artist Erre Gálvez proposes a journey through his particular universe of photography and paper. Works created with found elements or analog photographs taken by the artist himself with which he begins, as in a game, to create compositions. Each piece made up of small pieces of history opens the doors of nostalgia and memories tangibly.

All images will be exhibited for four months, until January 31 of next year. The councilor for Historical and Cultural Heritage, Ana Pellicer, has invited citizens to visit the different exhibition spaces to “enjoy this comprehensive collective exhibition that we are sure the public will like.”