Melissa Raymond & René Sandín’s “Face au soleil » will open at Km 0.2 (619 Cerra Street, second floor) on Saturday, August 6, 2022, from 6:00 to 10:00pm.

Km 0.2 is pleased to announce its next exhibition entitled “Face au soleil,” the first exhibition of the duo Melissa Raymond and René Sandín at this art venue.

The artists present a body of work driven by a need to position themselves facing the sun. The practice activates a kind of portal through its connection with the sun as an element associated with the Caribbean and the island and gives rise to a meditation on the here and the hereafter.

The collected works are developed from a recognizable project on Puerto Rican municipal painting—entitled Internal Tourism—but from the perspective of distance, a distance that is also blinding, like the sun itself. Where the “internal” aspect of internal tourism becomes impossible, the artists cling to their color samples as pieces of land, memory of another time, and transform their approach on the politicized color taken from the municipalities of the island of Puerto Rico. Here the duo redirects the gaze towards a mystical, symbolic, and primitive sphere: a nod to ancestral pictorial expressions towards the sun and other natural forms. Seen this way, the exhibition alludes to a metaphysical pastime: an extra-corporeal (territorial) experience of internal tourism.

In this group of works, the duo alters, overlaps, and regroups the municipal color codes— blurring the geographical limitations of the palette—and approaches the colors from the aspects of energy and symbolic charge. The result is a production on the opposite side of the scientific spectrum, representing Caribbean landscape phenomena—sunsets, waterfalls, heat—from a spiritual and ethereal spectrum. The works here point to a tropical iconography of the sublime, an ancestral vacationing, based on municipal painting. With the sun as a vanishing point.

[Translated by Ivette Romero.] For more information, see https://www.elkilometro.org/