Reviews

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.

Antoni Miralda’s installation, Lingua, at Art@Work confirms the institutional overflow that has characterized this exhibition space located in the waiting room of a dentist’s office.

A constant in the work of Carlos Castro is the questioning of cultural referents through humor, using the symbols and icons recognizable in a society, transforming them and contextualizing them in other places within the collective imaginary.

It is a generation of somber hues. In sharp contrast with the Brazilian concrete project, the wave of artists now coming of age in the country shrug off the modernist inheritance, the cerebral objectivity that marked the strongest movement the region has produced, to concentrate on the leftovers.

Video and electronic-based artistic media are the habitual supports for the work of Leticia El Halli Obeid (1975). One of these pieces, Menos tiempo que lugar (Less time than space), curated by Alfons Hug, is currently being shown at the Latin American Pavilion in the Venice Biennial, alongside other videos by young artists.

When asked where he is from, Saraceno simply replies, “I am from planet earth.” At the tender age of one, Tomás Saraceno and his parents were exiled to Italy, only returning to Argentina 11 years later, in 1986.

Antonio Seguí´s retrospective at Nohra Haime Gallery covers work ranging from the early years of his artistic career to his more recent production, focusing on works produced from the 1990s to the present.

For many years Cristina Piffer (Buenos Aires, 1953) has been weaving a weft that links the history of Argentina and certain organic elements, challenging dominant narrations and conveying visibility to characters these narratives have forgotten, counting losses of lives, anonymous or with names and surnames, denouncing diverse slaughters.

Fiction and reality coalesce in Panteón de los héroes. Historias, próceres y otros en el arte contemporáneo (The heroes’ pantheon, Histories, patriots and others in contemporary art), displayed at OSDE Foundation and curated by Isabel Plante and Sebastián Vidal Mackinson, who question concepts historically rooted in history, in coincidence with the recent Bicentennial of Argentina in 2010.

The central axis of Tomás Rivas’s oeuvre is architecture, in particular, the way in which a glorious past may be reconstructed and architectural history reviewed.

Comprised of works by 18 Chilean artists of international renown, this exhibition depicts key moments of the critical-experimental scene that emerged in the 1990s in Chile.

Frozen on the gallery ceiling are metal ribbons like the ones used to decorate car shops, but these are hard, motionless. Cinthia Marcelle constructs a numbed spectacle to denote that the happy days, or at least the era when money had a value, are over.

Leo cannot change the world. And Leonilson, the artist who wrote that phrase as a sad confession in several of his drawings knew this.

If the space between two pages of a book had volume and weight, it would be made of concrete. At least, such was the proposal that the Argentine artist Pablo Accinelli featured in one of the works he exhibited at Luisa Strina Gallery, Sao Paulo.

Julio Pacheco Rivas (Caracas, 1953) belongs with the kind of artists whose consistency over time must be recognized. One must also acknowledge the evolution of his work and his constant search.

Currently, the information we receive as a result of globalization is so much that it is almost impossible to process it simultaneously.

Finland is one of the northernmost countries in Europe. To Latin Americans, this country situated between parallels 60° and 70° N, may seem so far away.