Beatriz Guzman Catena

Exhibition by Beatriz Guzman Catena: “Urbanité” from 8 September to 24 October 2020 at the Espace d’art Chaillioux, 7 rue Louise Bourgeois, 94260 Fresnes.

Vernissage on Saturday 19 September at 3 pm.

The Trésor de la langue française, an absolute reference for our language, gives two definitions for the word Urbanité :

A. Civil manner of the ancient Romans […]; by extension, fine and delicate politeness, a manner in which a lot of natural affability and worldly customs enter into it.
B. Character of what makes a city […].
It is, of course, in the second of these senses that our exhibition fits in. However, we have selected six artists who attempt to characterise the city using this affability, which falls under the definition of A. above.

In the series of paintings presented in this exhibition, the domestic world, real or fantasised, and the urban presence intertwine in a kaleidoscopic and joyful approach which makes it difficult to identify what belongs to the private sphere and what belongs to the world of the city. Inside and outside merge, as if the individuals depicted were appropriating their vision of the city to integrate it into their personal history, micro-narrations, sometimes hallucinated, which invite us to a journey, as geographical as it is mental, and end up contaminating the entire pictorial surface. All this, without the slightest aggression, but for “a long journey where the bequeathed things, these important cultural containers, will link past memories to the present to copy each other. In this way, distant resonances will be deposited on new territories, like swept pigments, insinuating themselves into our present… “Beatriz Guzman Catena makes the urban environment and domestic interiors interpenetrate, thus blurring the notions of inside and outside, private and public space.