Generation Y or the Millennium Generation is the generation that follows Generation X and encompasses those born between the years 1980 and 2000. All of us born between these years have something in common, a radical change in the paradigms of understanding. Conditioned by television, advertising, the virtual world, video games, and new technologies, Millennials experience a change in the understanding of space and objects. To understand the world we live in, we must understand what surrounds us. The artist understands space as an action and relationship of the individual with the place and objects of our time, and it is in this action and relationship that we find the greatest change. With the digital revolution starting in the 1970s, the mechanical, electrical, and analog world was displaced by the digital world; the world of data that would lead to the virtual world. This is where the concept of the Generation Y exhibition resides. The loss and wear of manual skills or the analog, of individual empirical knowledge, and the need to seek the veracity of things for oneself beyond the conformism found in the thousands of images on our devices, leading us to increasingly believe that reality lies in a world beyond the screen. The artist's work, developed with languages ranging from abstraction to figuration, aims to question our ability to understand the real and the fictitious. His aesthetic, conditioned by the digital and virtual world, brings us closer to his inventory of objects that seem to come from a computer screen. His work is related to current product aesthetics, with authors like the philosopher Byung-Chul Han being very relevant to his work and its aesthetics. Thus, he seeks to find a method of connection between viewers, all of them linked by temporality and conditions that currently interfere with our experience. The artist, very close to nature and landscape due to his place of origin, presents the landscape itself from a new perspective, showing a period of change, from contact with the material object to the sensation and disappearance of physical relationships. The exhibition presents a set of pieces where the manual and the virtual world dialogue. A contrast that shows confusion, speed of change, and the transformation of our days, consequently affecting our need to constantly remodel our understanding according to the speed with which objects and space change today.
The work of Miguel Ángel Cardenal immerses us in a world where geometric figures and recognizable formal elements of daily life converge with almost virtual spaces, of saturated colors, often artificial tones, and organized in a way that gives the impression of a computer error. One of the aspects of his artistic practice is therefore to investigate our perception and relationships with landscapes, objects, or spaces, taking into account the impact of the digital age and consequently the new ways of conceiving the world. His work has been featured in multiple exhibitions, both collective and individual, in various cities in Spain and at established and emerging contemporary art fairs, such as Estampa and Hybrid Fair.
