STOA
KIAF 2017

ABOUT WORKS OF ERIC AMAN TO BE EXHIBITED IN KIAF 2017
French artist with academic training in Fine Arts, in France and Italy, where he was living and working 17 years. Currently he lives and works between Spain and Italy.
Our proposal is the new series in which he is working. The original idea comes from the book "Iconology" by Cesare Ripa, the great classic of the seventeenth century on the theory of images, essential to enter the world of allegories. Eric takes Ripa´s text as a starting point to elaborate his own mythology, in which anthropomorphic beings represent concepts, states of mind, virtues, vices, passions...
For Ripa, any allegory must be enigmatic, and it should not be easily understood. Faithful to that advice, Eric endows his works with enigmatic letters and signs. Therefore they are epigraphic sculptures in which they appear with incised letters and signs of ancient alphabets not deciphered, or legible, like the Iberian or the Etruscan, whose reading is possible, but not its translation. As Ripa used for his book numerous sources of information, emphasizing the classic mythology, Eric recurs to multiple channels, product of his formation, eminently classic. Sculptor trained in France first, in the principles of French classicism, later he completed his training with the Italian Quattrocento, in Italy. All this flow of influences is synthesized in this series.
ABOUT WORKS OF CONCHI ALVAREZ TO BE EXHIBITED IN KIAF 2017
Spanish artist and curator, her academic and professional training was in Ancient History and Archaeology. She have worked as a History Professor, later, she changed, professionally speaking, into the Art World. She lives and works in Spain.
Her works belongs to figurative painting, full of vibrant color and powerful, compositional elegance and refined technique in oils and acrylics. Her international exhibitions are carefully curated by herself and she is working in different series: the female world (The Ritual of Andalusian Woman, Flamenco Woman), urban landscapes (Urban Daydreams), the series of the Ritual of the Bullfighter, and the series about the amazing and wonderful performance that takes place every year in many Spanish cities, the Semana Santa Series (Holly Week).
Our proposal for KIAF, are works of two series:
-Urban Landscapes in acrylic on panel, which are particularly relevant in her production, consolidating a series that the artist calls "Urban Daydreams”. An urban landscape, its own, with sharp features, setting her own stamp where the vibrant colors flood each work, applied with loose brushstrokes and using many glazes, often painted with fingers. Saturated colors bathed in a light so powerful, that one can only speak of “Southern Mediterranean Luminism”. The journey can not be more subjective, just through the loved cities, cities where the artist takes long walks to live and feel the city. It is never the city, but "her" city, and always the old town where urban history is concentrated, where many essences and experiences that explode in her paintings, overlap, in layers, in a metamorphosis of color that does not affect the forms, because the corners and streets can be easily recognized. They are moments and lonely spaces, without people, but full of that humanity that seems to have lived it, just waiting to be revealed to the artist. With her camera, she is able to retain the precious moments in all its details, photographed moments of inestimable help, no doubt, to recall later in the study, all that experience, all the magic that wrapped this moment of seduction between the city and artist. Surely it is no coincidence the author's passion for archeology to understand the creative process of "urban itinerary", spaces full of immeasurable code of shapes, lights and colors only accessible and interpretable by its discoverer that, layer to layer, unravels, studies …"Urban Itineraries", perhaps vital itinerary, because the gaze of the artist toward the city becomes a mirror of her own existence, or of her own desire.
-Portraits in oil on canvas, which are part of the series about The Andalucian Woman, The Flamenco Woman. In that works we appreciate a creative, sensitive, passionate female with the fears, yearnings and aspirations of any woman. The beginning of the series was “The Woman’s Ritual”, a ritual that has developed in all cultures and which, in the case of the Flamenco woman, has a spectacular plasticity and beauty. It was natural, since the artist resides in Andalusia. The first approach to the theme was the plastic beauty displayed by Flamenco women on the days of the Fair. The streets and squares, but above all, the fairgrounds throughout Andalusia are filled with flamenco women radiating color, resembling flowers swaying with infinite grace. The series has gone deeper into the feminine interior and the author has been investigating increasingly complex questions: the reason for this ritual, for whom, why… Right now the work is generating works of art in which, sometimes the mind, others, the most, the heart of the Flamenco woman, makes her own catharsis wondering about herself, about her loved one, doubting, mocking, tearing… and she is no longer just the Flamenco woman, she happens to represent, in reality, the female gender.
ABOUT WORKS OF FRANCO SCALESE TO BE EXHIBITED IN KIAF 2017
This Swiss sculptor and painter, lives in Zurich. Our proposal for KIAF are small sculptures, “sculptural objects” pieces where the juxtaposition of elements becomes exquisite and elegant art, made in resin, whit photograph negative and gold-leaf. All of the sculptures express a universal and timeless theme, the memory, and at the same time personal, the remembrance. All the pieces describe a glance to the past from the watchtower of a joyful and nostalgic remembrance. Franco recalls the almost stories that his grandmother told him and, once apprehended, internalized, forming part of his innermost self, as a second skin, emerge in his art in that magical ritual of mixing elements and achieving elegant and enigmatic pieces, that attract by its old flavor and that sensation of “déjà vu” that provoke in us the old photographs.
ABOUT WORKS OF JULIE ALEGRE TO BE EXHIBITED IN KIAF 2017
French painter, she is author of shocking abstract pieces. Her fascination for the Mediterranean Sea is always present in all her works, both the north of Africa, where she has lived part of her childhood and France where she has been living until today. She uses formats of different sizes with a light support, Canson paper and using a thousand-year-old technique, the ink. The colour inks, on her brushes, seem to explode creating a colourful impulse as old as mankind, the femininity in its different aspects: especially when it has to do with the cult of the Mother Goddess, the Mediterranean Potnia Theron, considering the theme of the maternity with apparent naivety, almost childish. Doubtless, from the warmth that her works transmit, we perceive a universal and feminine tenderness which does not know about religion, language or race…