Reviews

In the 1960s sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick coined the term “kipple” to explain the astonishing ability of household objects to accumulate in piles of unwanted clutter.

The name Matías Duville (Buenos Aires, 1974) started to appear shyly in the Argentine circuit at the beginning of the present decade.

Javier Téllez inscribed his name in the history of contemporary art in Venezuela when he transplanted the sinister atmosphere of a psychiatric institution to the spaces of the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas.

In the exhibition of works by Félix González Torres currently on display at the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires, art merges with life.

Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard: Author of the Quijote”

In May 2008, Josée Bienvenu Gallery presented artist Darío Escobar ́s exhibition, ́Play Offs ́. In his first solo show in this New York gallery, the artist featured a series of works reviewing the sculptural operations which have been emblematic in his trajectory over the past ten years.

At last, eleven years after his passing away, Colombia ́s National Museum dedicated a well-deserved tribute to Carlos Rojas.

Under the title Operativo/Raid, Teresa Margolles presented her first solo show in New York, structured as two consecutive exhibitions at Y Gallery, and curated by Cecilia Jurado.

Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, the new director of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, CPPC, has the merit of breaking the paradigms that inadvertently configure the imaginaries of culture.

A fundamental artificer of the birth of geometric abstract art in Uruguay, painter and sculptor Maria Freire (1917) continues to be one of its select representatives.

Next to nothing. As we enter the Jorge Mara-La Ruche gallery, the white canvases, reinforced by the white walls of the very elegant and extended exhibition room, project an impression of emptiness.

Minimum Landscapes, The exhibition by Sao Paulo artist Artur Lescher, at Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, is the first solo show by the artist in the USA.

Arnaldo Roche Rabell often resorts to several types of models: models considered to define trends and/or essences –internal, Caribbean, European– that establish an intercultural dialogue.

Jorge Cabieses ́s oeuvre is one of the most transcendent within the generation that attempts to revamp the ways of seeing and making art in Peru.

Besides, even when the subject is different, people always paint the same painting. - Andy Warhol. THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again)

Inscribed within the conceptualist trends on account of his reflexive lineage, geographically and culturally anchored in the contradictions of a Catholic Caribbean America, Héctor Fuenmayor is a Venezuelan artist whose oeuvre is difficult to situate both within local and foreign historiographical frameworks.

John Perreault: “At the end of the 1960s, when we were part of a group which included Scott Burton and Vito Acconci, among others, it seemed that your forte was to invent a basic innovation and, based on it and on the “ism” it generated, begin to construct your work. ¿Do you still believe that is what must be done?”
EC: “Yes”(1)

Aprofound humanist concern underlies the work of Colombian artist Doris Salcedo. Shibboleth, her most recent work exhibited at the Turbine Hall in London between October 2007 and April 2008, reiterates this concern. As the artist states, this work makes reference to the deep divisions that prevail in the present-day world.

The panorama of contemporary visual art, in full evolution, is forever presenting us with work that goes beyond the limits we know.

Miguel Ángel Rojas invents ways of doing that go beyond “the academic”.

A post-culture situation like the one we are experiencing at present is the breeding ground that unveils and highlights particularities and singularities, questioning de facto hegemonies – including contemporary artistic practice itself.

Last year I proposed a reading of Arturo Herrera’s output that counters previous interpretations. That first text steps back from other writers’ psychoanalytic treatment of Herrera’s tendency to fragment the silhouettes of cartoon figures and reinscribe them in a both gestural and serialized mode of abstraction.

First space for socialization, the table is where children learn to share and adults make a cult of conversation.