COLLABORATIVE PAINTINGS 5 and 6 Syndikat & Residence Evil Organized by Glogauair + DXIX
Participating artists: Carlos Asensio, Carrie Stubbs, Kayleigh Maimaran, Carina Chang, Noah Gokul, Martyna Lebryk, Mascoga,Sergei Kureck,Mason Weiss, Savanna Fortgang, Sophia, Julia Rigby, Elizabeth Littlejohn and Aitor Lajarin Encina,
With the support of the Glogauair team: Mariona Benaiges, Laura Olea Lopez, and Suzy Royal
Aitor Lajarin is an interdisciplinary artist and organizer from the Basque country of Spain, currently living and working in Fort Collins, Colorado, United States. A big part of his art practice is dedicated to making paintings. In his paintings, he uses cartoonist imagery to depict imaginary scenes in which he invites the viewer to reflect with perplexity on the most absurd or paradoxical aspects of human and non-human existence or the society we suffer and observe every day. His paintings are also a playful celebration of the medium of painting and its physical and sensorial presence.
For a few years, Aitor has also been very involved in organizing and producing art experiences and materials revolving around other people's work, like exhibitions, events, editions, and books, for example. Diverse projects like Micrologies, a series of exhibitions focused on exploring issues of small-scale aesthetics and politics in art making, presenting a few dozen tiny-scale artworks. The idea of scale as a radical instigator of awareness of our relationship to the world around us is an essential overarching idea in Aitor's art practice.
Merging his interests in painting, organizing, and scale aesthetics, a couple of years ago, Aitor decided to invite other artists and curators to organize exhibitions in, on, and for his paintings. This series, which he calls "collaborative paintings," consists of small-scale exhibitions hosted in his paintings, in the figurative visual spaces depicted on his paintings, and on their flat material surfaces.
During his time at Glogauair, Aitor has worked on organizing two more collaborative painting projects with the collaboration of Glogauair curatorial team and several of the current residents. "Sydinkat" is a painting that he painted, evoking loosely a memory of a great bar he spent a day in with his friend Isma in Neukölln Berlin in 2019. He painted the piece in Fort Collins and shipped the piece to Berlin recently. Some of the other artists in residence have freely created art or artistic interventions for its surface. The collaborating artists had full control, and Aitor really didn't know until the interventions were done what the result would be. This painting is now on show at Glogauair's showcase window. At the same time, these same artists created small-scale artworks that were shipped to Colorado. Each artist provided a description of a virtual, pictorial space where they would like to see their pieces. Aitor made "Residence Evil," a painting that somehow stitches all those spaces in one image and is simultaneously on show at DXIX, an artist-run gallery space in the Art and Art History Department at Colorado State University, where Aitor teaches painting and socially engaged art.
It is for the viewer to determine if these paintings are proper exhibitions, paintings, participatory art pieces, curatorial projects, or something else, all or none of the above. It is up to the viewer to determine if they do offer an opportunity to explore and test some potentially interesting and ludic forms of artistic and social production, dissemination, collaboration, negotiation, and community building. In any case, one more time, this project demonstrates that painting, far from being dead, is like the villain in a Hollywood movie that stubbornly resists disappearance through multiple adaptions, reinventions, and resurrections. Painting is not dead. Painting is evil.