Elena Urucatu and Carlos Maté

Statement

Our work is someone’s story who sees no point in making art because he has lost any hope in the human being. He thinks we are a terrible species dragging the whole planet into death and extinction. But as he is bored he decides to entertain himself by celebrating a funeral for the world … his own world as well. And in this gesture he finds the meaning of art that he was no longer looking for, that is to say, he discovers it in the abyss, in the dark beauty hidden within human monstrosity. Something which is a melancholic contradiction: very much to his regret, in this same gesture of despair towards the human being, he shows a terrible faith in men, because deep down he believes that they have similar wounds and will understand him.

GlogauAIR Project

The year without a summer

We don’t just want to talk about the excesses of our time, we want to include ourselves deep into them. It is clear that we live immersed in a world of ruins, a world whose pretensions to modernity have ended up reducing history to debris. Only by living among the ruins you begin not to differentiate them. To not distinguish between the traces of what was and the collapse jet to come… between the ghosts of the past and the announced monsters of the future.

And this is where we place the starting point of the residency at GlogauAIR. In a research exercise inside this diffuse crack that defines our time, an archaeology behind this interpretation of the ruin as a sign of the moment of cultural, political and ecological rupture that we live in. We will therefore start from our personal wreck and the approaching humanity collapse to treat it as a precarious sculpture of what is about to disappear, a choreography of the fragile and the destruction: celebrating the ruin as an objective, as an aesthetic ideal, as a perfect state.

CV Summary

Carlos Maté and Elena Urucatu are visual artists based in Madrid.

• Carlos has a background in architecture and design, Elena in industrial design and in 2012 they joined forces under the name of Carlos Maté studio and gradually made the transition to the visual arts, where they work especially in installation, performance, sculpture and drawing, but also video and sound art and even poetry and literature.
• Their work has been seen at the Circulo de Bellas Artes, Media Lab-Prado, Centre del Carme, the Fiart Foundation, Luisa delle Piane Gallery and Modus Operandi Gallery, at Sonar Barcelona, as well as at the Ljubljana Biennial and Design Week in Milan.
• Carlos Maté Studio/ Artist duo
• Carlos Maté (1978, Burgos, Spain) + Elena Urucatu (1981, Bucharest, Romania)

Solo Exhibitions

• 2020 The blink of an alien. Modus Operandi, Madrid
• 2019 Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Modus Operandi Gallery, Madrid
• 2018 Invented Memories, TheRedoom Gallery, Madrid
• 2017 Invented Memories, University of Burgos
• 2016 Darkness. Instalation at SONAR2016, Barcelona
• 2014 Melancholia Gran vía. Gran via 56 Gallery. Madrid
• 2014 Initiation. La Neomudéjar Art Center, Madrid
• 2014 She was Here. Living room. Ventura Lambrate. Milano
• 2012 Inner world prototypes. Light Space Milano

Collective exhibitions

• 2020 Made In. Violencias Silenciadas. Madrid
• 2018 Contra la censura. Itinerante
• 2018 Demodé. Centro Dados Negros. Ciudad Real
• 2018 Black or White. Circulo de Bellas Artes. Madrid
• 2018 Usa, Flags. Aspa Contemporary. Madrid
• 2017 Stickers PAC. Feria Estampa. Madrid
• 2017 Usa, Flags. Centre del Carme. Valencia
• 2017 Usa, Flags. Circulo de Bellas Artes. Madrid
• 2015 Hostel Art. Plataform a Arte contemporánea. Madrid
• 2014 Vanguardias y Periferias. La Neomudejar. Madrid
• 2014 Heroins, Sierra Norte Art Center, Madrid
• 2013 Masquelibros. COAM, Madrid

Gallery