Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry - le Crédac

Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza

11 Apr - 22 Jun 2014

ESTEFANÍA PEÑAFIEL LOAIZA
l'espace épisodique (episodic space)
11 April - 22 June 2014

Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza, born in Ecuador in 1978, came to France in 2002 to continue her art studies, initially at the Beaux-arts school in Paris and subsequently Lyon.

She has constructed her work around the tension between the visible and the invisible. Invited to exhibit at Le Crédac in 2007, for example, she produced an almost imperceptible piece entitled mirages(s) 2. ligne imaginaire, équateur (2007), a long rubber line on the wall at eye level running parallel to the floor. Like the way one indicates the horizon, this line, radical and precise at one and the same time, conjures up the imaginary line of the equator in her native Ecuador.

Peñafiel Loaiza has continued to adhere to this esthetic position and the striking economy it shows in the means it employs. There is a play of appropriation and subversion that takes shape, for instance, in acts of destruction (pages with holes, erased ink, rubbed out images) and reconstruction (backwards reading and rewriting) which are perpetrated against images and language. This plastic dimension, however, does not exclude a political position that generates meaning. A vector of memory, the invisible mass of nameless persons—demonstrators, immigrants, extras and supporting roles in movies—is brought to light through traces that are themselves imperceptible.

At the Manufacture des Œillets, the former eyelet factory that is now home to Le Crédac, Peñafiel Loaiza intends to conjure up the earlier use of the site, that is, labor, the noise of machines, mechanical operations. In this building, constructed in 1913 from the American “Daylight Factory” model, daylight once punctuated the machine pace of the work. The artist is focusing on this aspect of the venue, which is inseparable from the world of the working classes, and will be doing art work in the center’s exhibition galleries, as well as the oldest part of the site (the Manufacture’s Main Hall), specifically its clock. The large clock that parceled out the working day of the laborers is now stopped and only its light continues to function.

L’espace épisodique will feature completely new works by Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza as well as a cycle of films programed by the artist and screened at Ivry’s Le Luxy cinema, including Georges Franju’s Eyes Without A Face (1960), Pedro Costa’s Casa de Lava (1994), and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Canine (2009).