Reviews

The following conversation between Emilio Chapela and me centers around several paintings, photographs, and sculptures at the Henrique Faria Gallery and the Pace/MacGill Gallery in NewYork.

To “think” contemporary art demands considering the recapitulation of ideas and concepts. Post-modernity has placed in the spotlight the recycling of philosophies, stands and concerns that allow the contemporary artist to become immersed, in a more realistic and effective way, in the study of the issues that make up and define the social physiognomy of his immediate reality.

Life makes no sense. That is why art exists. We are doomed to insist, to wish to remain, to persist through time, but our fate is to leave. We know this since childhood: in the future there will be a day when we will no longer be here. Although it makes no sense, life is an explosion of intensity.

By destruction I understand all those processes that show what we call losses. Traumas which in most cases explain a complete deracination of memories, but which inevitably leave a series of flashes of reminiscences along the way; semi invisible landmarks that evidence the idealization of a traveled road.

The consistency of the work produced by Juan Melé harmonizes with the exhibition space in the Galerie Argentine − Argentine Embassy. In a curatorial exercise detached from chronological organizations, the show develops organically amidst paintings, sculptures and engravings.

The exhibition Rogelio López Marín (Gory): Selected Photographs 1984-1994, permits a recapitulation of a crucial moment in contemporary Cuban art through an impeccable selection of this author’s most emblematic series, included in the Liza and Arturo Mosquera Collection.

One of the most important images of the Colombian cultural imaginary is that of the Tequendama Falls; nineteenth-century renditions by Alexander von Humboldt or Manuel María Paz have accompanied traveler’s books and books about Colombian history to our days.

In an interview with Jesús Soto conducted by art critic and curator Guy Brett in 1965, the artist commented on how difficult it was for the spectator to understand abstract art as something based on life itself.

Each time one has the chance to revisit Tunga’s (Palmares, Brazil, 1952) oeuvre, one may confirm both the passion he has for his work and the magic that the discovery of this passion produces.

Artist Hugo Lugo’s (Los Mochis, Sin, 1974) most recent exhibition in Mexico opened a few weeks ago at the MASIN (Sinaloa Art Museum), revisiting some of the pieces shown in “La superficie del precipicio” (The Surface of the Precipice) − his first museum solo show exhibited at the Nuevo León Center for the Arts, 2010.

The capacity for transformation that may be perceived in Omar Carreño’s works reveals, right from the start, the Utopian dream of any artist: that of being able to create a new order for the world.

Carola Bravo is an architect, art historian and artist. These characteristics are evident in her work in the field of the visual arts. For any architect or engineer, it is customary to work with contours in topography.

Catalina Parra (Chilean, born 1940) is a conceptual artist, whose career spans from the early 1970s to the present, addressing contemporary socio-political issues through the appropriation of images and language taken from mass media.

Five centuries before our era, Melissus of Samos, the last of the philosophers of the Eleatic School, declared: “There is no void, for the void is nothing, and ‘nothing’ can not be.” In her works, Carmen Ramírez updates this reflection on the void. A void that is the carrier of an infinite strength.

Borges, an inhabitant of libraries that broadened his imagination to the point of showing him the possibility of the Aleph, which concentrates in a minimum diameter all that has been, is, and will be, did not allow novelty to impress him.

Among the essays, interviews and articles I received as contributions for the preparation of this brief text on Jonathan Hernández (Mexico, 1972), there appeared, without any explanation, a fragment of a book by Wittgenstein, entitled in its English version, Light and Shadow, A nightly (dream-) experience and a fragment of a letter.

The visual artist Pedro Tyler has repeatedly concerned himself with systems of measurement in his work. By de-contextualizing “measuring rulers” − made from such materials as wood and metal − he generates a variety of compositions through which he achieves the construction of forms and mechanisms that are completely unexpected in terms of these objects.

Twenty-five years after Jorge Luis Borges’s death – June 14 was the anniversary of this date - Buenos Aires has become the venue for big
and small celebrations to commemorate the famous Argentine writer.

The International Festival of Photography and Visual Arts is, unquestionably, one of cultural events in Spain that grows year after year.

For her solo exhibition at Fortes Vilaça, French artist Marine Hugonnier decided to probe Brazilian history going back to the press as testaments of a time.

The Colombian artist Daniel Santiago Salguero presented, at Galería AFA, a show that revisits, through five installations, his work of the past few years, in which he reflects on “the passing of the days”.

Néstor Gutiérrez and Bernardo Montoya exhibited at Galería PD, in the smart neighbourhood of La Magdalena, in Bogotá, directed by Luisa Posada.
The show consisted of two dissimilar proposals, but linked through an underlying interest in painting.

Mayami Son Machín was, first and foremost, a fun exhibition and as is often the case with a good sense of humor, a keen commentary regarding our reality. The evident sense of pastiche in the title of the exhibition itself was the constant that guided Mayami Son Machín along its amusing scrutiny of the prejudices and clichés that identify Latino culture.

The name Luis Fernando Peláez is already looked upon as the synonym of a starting point toward silent, winter landscapes, where a poetics of grays take us to a sort of longing, to the innermost nostalgias enclosed in his sculptures featuring almost photographic places that seem to have emerged from a painting, and that, installed in the reality of three-dimensional objects, contain the human condition in its loneliest moments.