Reviews

If there is no longer a center of the international art world, New York at very least remains one of a select few sites for what Pierre Bourdieu long ago called “position-taking”: the articulation of an aesthetic position in relation to a larger field of cultural production.

Hugo Zapata is a dreamer of utopias who, by dint of holding a dialogue with the earth, suddenly found himself talking to the cosmogony of the Incas, the Mayas and the Aztecs.

There were no Impressionist sunsets before Monet painted them. Oscar Wilde knew it, and for this reason he asserted that nature imitates art.

In Mateo López’s oeuvre, drawing and its three-dimensional projections are analogous to the hand that gropingly explores the world, spreading out into lines over the space with a playfulness that evokes Plato’s Myth of the Cave.

It happened during the crisis of 2001. Hundreds of metal signs began to appear in the neighborhoods. Like never before.

Anthony Goicolea’s entire body of work can be described as a fictional autobiography.

Certain vices of post-90s Chilean art are evident in the proposal of Incas of Emergency: a tautological propension in the thematized work itself, and a distance between aesthetic experience and art discourse.

The works exhibited in “Crónicas eventuales” confirm the fact that the art of Jorge Macchi (Buenos Aires, 1963) resides in the possibility of poetry, forged in his notorious sensitivity and his different visions of everyday life.

In the Guilty! series, Marcelo Grosman (Buenos Aires, 1958) ventures along an uncomfortable path, wondering who might be the one to blame in a society that makes criminals, that judges based on appearance (color, sex, origin).

Time, memory and words are part of the recurring concerns in the work of Carlos Gallardo (Buenos Aires, 1944-2008)

In this new exhibition, “El Ajuar”, in Maman Gallery, Jorge Canale (1954) creates once again, with the refined aesthetics that characterizes him, the adequate space and atmosphere to convey his message.

Nicanor Aráoz, a young man who until recently, with just a pot of cocoa and a broken shelf, devised a way to represent anguish, presents a show devoted to Hitchcock at Daniel Abate Gallery.

Diego Vergara presented his first solo show in Buenos Aires, under the title “La existencia está en otra parte” (Life is elsewhere), a phrase excerpted from André Breton’s surrealist manifesto.

Oscar Smoje’s (Buenos Aires, 1939) new exhibition of works on paper, Oso inédito, is worthy of celebration, since it is increasingly difficult to see this artist’s production in public.

The TV and the celebrity gossip magazines have brought to the forefront of public consideration a series of vaudeville characters, dancers with generous curves in the habit of airing with unusual shamelessness and before millions of people details of their sometimes turbulent existence.

Hélio Oiticica: Museu É o Mundo (Museum is the World) opened on Saturday, March 20.

It would be tautological to say that Johanna Calle is one of the Colombian contemporary artists with the greatest projection.

Traditionally, art collecting has been one of the marginal themes in the history of Colombian art.

For many years, Colombian artist José Alejandro Restrepo has developed a research focused on the relationships between art, body, religion and violence.

With the persistence of the theme of anguish in contemporary man, Alirio Rodríguez (Venezuela, 1934) presents his latest exhibition, which relates to the 1976 series “In front of the abyss".

The work that is being currently exhibited by José Luis López Reus (Caracas, 1966) at Fernando Zubillaga Gallery has a rela- tion with his final stage as a textile designer.

José Gabriel Fernández (Caracas, 1957) had in the past developed some installations using bull fighters ́cloaks.

Iván Puig was born in 1977 in Guadalajara, the same city where the seminal Mexican master, Dr Atl, had come into this world 102 years earlier, and he abides by artistic concepts that tend to revolutionize creative visual praxis in the 21st century, just like Mr. Gerardo Murillo did in Mexican visual arts at the beginning of the 20th century.

Decoy, the exhibition of works by Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza, gathers together objectual constructions whose conformation and referential potential are the result, in each case, of interactions of varying degree and nature between different disciplines, models and systems of cultural production.