Reviews

Ronald Morán's individual exhibition, Por encima del Jardín (Above the Garden) (2021-2022), with which public activities were reinstated at the Marte Museum in San Salvador, has become a paradigmatic exhibition, not only as a new consecration of one of the Central American artists of greater international recognition, but as a sign of the vision of an institution that is committed to experimentation and accompaniment in the practices that link contemporary art and social imagination.

This exhibition features thirteen photographs by Gory from the Moonlight Serenade series (2012-2018). The essay by the curator Julia P. Herzberg discusses the varied contexts of the photographs, which are exhibited and discussed here for the first time.

One of the key works of the 34th São Paulo Biennial literally anchors the robust and uncomfortable presence between the interstitial areas of this modernist building, so questioned today. However, its meanings go beyond the perimeters of the construction and extend to, for example, some of the civic sculptures that populate public places throughout Brazil and that are also located in the surroundings.

With the curatorship of Félix Suazo, Pinta Miami 2021 becomes a scenario for immersive and thought provoking installations. The aim of Pinta’s section Special Projects is to accentuate the individuality and artistry of contemporary artists who, through their works and installations, bring to life the concerns and possibilities of the near future.

Recently, Richard Garet, a multimedia artist based primarily in New York City, opened a solo exhibition titled “Frame Compositions” with 1stDibs NFT marketplace. The eponymous show exhibits 29 vibrant NFT works and explores the relationship between color, light, surface and form. Garet’s practice encompasses sound installations, performance, computer applications and other mediums. Adhering to strict parameters, he creates compositions by carefully selecting high-definition 1080x1080-pixel square frames one-by-one and then collating 60 per second using computer applications. Because each work contains 1800 frames squeezed into a 30 second time period, the eye can no longer identify individual frames, thus, creating moving images.

“Moving with great fluidity between spirituality, the production of visuality, academic reflection and political action, Heráclito is explicit when he says that he wants to ‘act, in a symbolic way, on the devastating consequences of racism and social inequality that affect the black populations'." In this way, the curator and researcher Solange Farkas (Videobrasil and ex-MAM Bahía) summarizes the approach to the production of Ayrson Heráclito, a Bahian artist who won a retrospective at the MAR (Museu de Arte do Rio) and who had an important recent solo show at the Simões de Assis Gallery, in São Paulo.

In the interest of paying tribute to one of the photographers who contributed in building Argentina's visual identity, Francisco Medail dedicated the Artista Homenaje section in BAphoto to Lucrecia Plat. Working with an extensive archive of portraits, conceptual photographs and the collaboration of Clara Nerone, Medail highlights the important role of archives in the conception and appreciation of contemporary art.

Geometries Reimagined, the title of the inaugural exhibition at the Tanya Brillembourg Art space, inquires the way in which the incessant transformation of the abstract forms imagined since cave art, is once again realized in the works of Colombian Juan Raul Hoyos, Guatemalan Tepeu Choc, and Haitian Marcus Blake. By different means, the three of them confront the form that, since the onset of the 20^th century, generated the whole current of geometric abstraction imposing itself, according to Rosalind Krauss, as "the emblematic image of the modernist ambition" [1]: the grid. Its presence, explicit or tacit, continues to be unraveled and remade incessantly in contemporary art, and it is no stranger to that "schizophrenia" which, as Krauss wrote, arises between its concentration on the materiality of the pictorial surface and the undeniable spiritual tension that its mythical geometry contains [2]. No less is the opposition between the "discursive silence" sought in the grid through the "complete liberation from naturist appearances" [3], and the paradoxical conversion of its geometry form ─inexistent in nature─ into the matrix of urban modernity: Mondrian ended up creating Boogie Woogie, 1943, in allusion to the rhythm and pulsating vibration of New York.

In her first solo exhibition at the Deering Estate, Amalia Caputo considers how we construct nature and explore a site around systems of visual classification. Every Being is an Island is an immersive exhibition that serves as an extensive portrait of the native subtropical environment of South Florida.

The flows of architecture and circulation in continuous movement set the tone for the new commissioned and individual works that are exhibited now at the Inhotim Institute. There are three projects as the result of almost two years of inactivity, without openings, in the immense space of the cultural center located in Brumadinho, in Greater Belo Horizonte, capital of Minas Gerais. It is a mix between a botanical garden and a refuge for contemporary art works specially developed for the institution or that have been reformatted in this special exhibition context that extends over an old estate, now with 140 hectares of visitation.

Lydia Rubio was born in Havana, Cuba, with art in her bones. She comes from three generations of women painters, to be precise. "My grandmother painted every day, whenever she could," Lydia recalls. "She worked at an office but painted in the living room. The whole family lived together, so I used to see her painting there and was trained visually. My cousin, everybody was drawing and painting, but I was the only one that took it to another level of development and commitment."

José Luis Landet has been searching for the image of the Latin American landscape for years. And in El Atajo (The Shortcut), the exhibition that he presents in Marco, he finds some ways of approaching that idea. He builds ramps, connects vestiges, shreds colors, traces identikits, joins random images, creates an alphabet ... and ends up building a total idea of ​​our landscape, but above all of another subject that also haunts him: the painting. There is a large installation, a physical shortcut, and a set of 467 works that point to something that is clear in the subtitle: a displacement in the author.

Invisible Threads, Evelyn Politzer’s solo exhibition at the Miami Dade College Hialeah Art Gallery, curated   by Noor Blazekovic of Irreversible Projects.

ArtMedia Gallery, Miami

In the 15th edition of Pinta Miami, from December 1 to 5, 2021, Vivian Galban will participate with her installation, Exhibition in Real Time, which consists of a human-scale camera obscura where the visitor will first be portrayed and then invited to participate in the development process. Three works by the Argentine artist and photographer are briefly analyzed below as an introduction to her work.

The experimentation of the process, the disappearance of the portrayed and the invisible moment.

The 322 pieces that make up Espíritos sem nome (Nameless Spirits), a retrospective dedicated to the production of the Bahian Mario Cravo Neto (1947-2009) at the São Paulo headquarters of the Moreira Salles Institute, attest to his vigor as a visual artist; With the robustness of his work, he permeates media beyond photography, since he produces pieces in languages ​​such as cinema, the three-dimensional, drawing and publishing, among others.

Is a visual manifesto possible? How to show the possible dialogues between art and education? How many images are within each image? How many words are in each word? What's in between? With these questions, the Argentine artist Marina De Caro introduces us to her exhibition Tierra de las emociones perdidas (Land of Lost Emotions), at the Ruth Benzacar gallery in the city of Buenos Aires, which brings together her most recent production.

Artists who have that ability to approach and distance themselves from reality have always caught my attention. Ronald Morán, (Salvadoran) is one of them; in this case, he offers us a double distancing: the distancing of a mimetic tradition that recycles reality with repeated images to the point of vertigo and, on the other hand, the distancing forced by the Covid 19 pandemic.

The narratives of the Brazilian avant-garde in the arts go through an intense revision. Due to the centenary of the Week of 22, the emblematic event that in the thesis launched the foundations of modernity through different languages​​and fields of activity in the country, three exhibitions currently on the billboard rotate and bring new elements from the production of two icons of Modernism in Visual Arts - Tarsila Do Amaral (1886-1973) and Di Cavalcanti (1897-1976). In addition, they cast more emphatic lights on three not-so-famous characters within the journeys within the movement and the modernist winds: Antonio Gomide (1895-1967), John Graz (1891-1980) and Regina Gomide-Graz (1897-1973) .

Probably anyone who is interested in the visual arts within the Latin American scene will be familiar with the work of the Chilean artist Paz Errázuriz. Her impressive work is characterized, above all, in working, through photography, themes linked to oblivion, marginality and exclusion, showing a particular interest in portraying those people that society, for various reasons, has left aside. This year, Errázuriz took a privileged spot at the 22nd Paiz Perdidos Art Biennial Perdidos. en Medio. Juntos. (Lost. In Between. Together) and she presents during the months of May and June a solo exhibition entitled La grandeza del margen (The Greatness of the Margin). From this exhibition, I find especially notable the Trans Guatemala (2020) and Sepur Zarco (2020) series, two unpublished series where problems of great contingency are evident.

After concluding her retrospective exhibition at the Miguel Urrutia Art Museum, of the Banco de la República, between October and December 2020, the artist Beatriz González has been invited to participate in the exhibition "Another Energy: Power to Continue Challenging", in the company of 15 women artists of wide range and different nationalities, at the Mori Museum in Tokyo (Japan). Here is a summary of her artistic career.

"But what messages do these artists, in O Ventre da Terra, address to us? (...) For them, the land is not just one thing. Now it is homeland and nation, sometimes nature and landscape, sometimes texture and materiality, now ancestral and primeval origin, now cemetery and final destination." The art critic from Rio de Janeiro Pollyana Quintella synthesizes the multiple vectors to which the thought-provoking group of pieces present in the collective exhibition of the gallery Superfície in São Paulo can be directed. It does not escape the attention of almost all women in authorship and the time when it was conceived - the 1970s, of marked experimentalism in the face of the repression of the lead years in the political sphere, which would still last some time in the 80´s.

It is not the first time that when I go through the work of José Luis Landet I am struck by the feeling that the perseverance, tenacity and insistence of his poetic project point to the realization of the total work of art. Perhaps it is because of the magnitude of his commitment or because of the breadth of his interests’ spectrum, but the feeling I am referring to - which in any case also finds echoes in certain formal decisions - refers to a kind of iron will to create a single work of art that combines the synthesis of all the others.