“Drawings, Memory”
From 17 January to 5 February, the El Convento Cultural Space in Viver hosted the exhibition “Drawings, Memory” by the artist Estellés Salomón from Godella. The exhibition put forward a proposal that reclaims drawing as a fully relevant means of expression in a context dominated by acceleration and image saturation.
The show brought together a series of large-format drawings that invited viewers to slow down their gaze and visually reconstruct fragments of the past. In contrast to the immediate consumption of digital images, drawing appears here as a space of resistance: slow, manual and deeply reflective.
The starting point of the exhibition was particularly evocative. Estellés Salomón worked from scenes filmed in Frankfurt in 1932 by the German artist Ella Bergmann-Michel, a pioneer of documentary cinema and a key figure in the European avant-garde. Bergmann-Michel used the camera to observe everyday life at a time of intense political and social tension, capturing streets, gestures and crowds with a critical eye and an awareness of what was about to disappear.
The exhibition offers a very timely reflection: how to look at images from the past from the present, and what place drawing occupies today as a medium for thinking, remembering and resisting oblivion. It is an invitation to pause, observe, and allow memory to be built slowly, line by line.
Film footage by Ella Bergmann: Wahlkampf 1932
Artist’s email: jestels@msn.com