XTRArt

Rómulo Celdrán's first exhibit in the United States will open on February 13 at the Hasted Kraeutler gallery in New York. In it, the young Spanish artist will present a wide solo exhibit of his latest drawings and sculptures. The pieces exhibited belong to the Zoom and Macro series that Celdrán has been working on for several years. Both series rediscover the everyday objects that surround us from a fascinating, amplified view.

Under the Zoom name, a set of drawings with the purpose of exploring the wide world of objects is materialized; this is what drives Rómulo Celdrán for different reasons, be these aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic), visual, functional or even emotional. The Zoom series seeks to develop the concepts that the Macro series explores in the field of sculpture in two dimensions.

The Zoom and Macro series contemplate human beings as an elliptical subject. They are ignored but not through negation but because their existence is assumed. These pieces talk about objects and scenarios devoid of explicit human existence and, at the same time, of places full of implicit human existence. Zoom and Macro act as the lenses in a camera, amplifying our view and breaking the correspondence between the real size of an object and the size we perceive it in according to how far we are from it. They act as a sort of magnifying glass that brings us closer to the object, even when we maintain an appropriate distance to be able to see it.

The concepts behind the series being exhibited give new dimensions to the object, strengthening its presence and inviting us to explore it, discovering hidden spaces and unnoticed corners. Celdrán puts us before a world at an augmented scale, as though a shrunken man was walking through a reality where objects were of an inappropriate size, becoming useless outside that human scale.

Rómulo Celdrán states: “I think there's something magical about the world of scales. There's some sort of emotional memory that invites us to feel macro objects as though they were a game. Like children, we see the world at a much bigger scale than others. To counter this feeling, many toy brands attempt to create a world in a children's scale. They manufacture cars, kitchens, tools and other objects in a children's scale. This memory of games, of curiosity, of memories is somehow stored in our minds. Discovery, surprise and, of course, irony are aspects I'd like to see around this series of pieces. Reality doesn't exist. And if what exists is the perception we have of it, why not explore the basic principles of that perception?”.

Sources: Hasted Kraeutler Gallery