Javier Arce, Bobby Dowler, Miguel Marina & Alberto Peral
Feeling time

3+1 Arte Contemporânea is pleased to present the upcoming group exhibition Feeling time, with works by Javier Arce (ES 1973), Bobby Dowler (UK 1983), Miguel Marina (ES 1989) and Alberto Peral (ES-BI 1966).

The exhibition explores themes relating to the governing of time within a contemporary framework, in relationship to space and perceptions on them. Under the title Feeling time, a title which has dually been gleaned from the title of Amit Yahav’s book¹ and the act itself of sensing time and a whimsical fictitious defining moment in time. In Yakav’s book she investigates the modes in which 18th century writers quantify time in an age of chronometry and the effect of this upon the individual.

Through various mediums of painting, sculpture and installation employed by the four artists, the exhibition seeks to highlight the notion of time within each divergent practice and their unique approach to this theme.

The manner in which Miguel Marina approaches painting as a process, that of almost mark-making, as each gesture is both at the same time is part of unique identity also form that of a part of a greater composition and landscape– the previous brush strokes inform that of the next in a continued rhythm which potentially continues on a path to the following canvas. While Javier Arce home environment is the basis of his work where the conflict between the realms of nature versus his work. An apparent hybrid between the two sites of his home in the countryside of Cantabria and that of the city emerge. Whether it be in materials used in his recent painting or the sculptures and installations which hark to an interlaced narrative of the two.

In this idea of two places, Alberto Peral’s sculptures breach two places, the within and the out, in the middle sometimes, whether it be in an existing structure or positioned ordinarily, the works exist and hark to a spatial field that questions its position contextually. A between. Like an unanswered question. His sculptures question reality as they fold, distort and mirror, as doppelgangers of themselves they reveal interchanging objects, almost evolving before the viewer. This varied layering of interpretation is also evident in the practice of Bobby Dowler. He refers to his paintings as “Painting objects” as he sources canvases and stretchers from friends and colleagues to construct them. Here, the works exist between the realms of sculpture and painting, resulting in a renewed language while harking to a history, and perhaps a connectedness like a web of consciousness.

¹ Feeling Time: Duration, the Novel, and Eighteenth-Century Sensibility Hardcover – May 8, 2018, by Amit S. Yahav (Author)