Reviews

In 2014, the non-profit organization Wildlife Conservation Society invited twelve Latin American artists to enter the Bahuaja Sonene Reserve located in the south east of Peru. The idea of ​​the program was, through artistic expression, to make known the reservation to the region so that awareness is generated. Bahuaja Sonene is one of the six national parks with the most biodiversity on the planet. Among the poets, musicians, chefs and visual artists invited to represent this great landscape was Roberto Huarcaya, a Peruvian psychologist, photographer and artist who has been experimenting with the notion of territory for several years from his series of panoramas Campos de Batalla (Battlefields).

Juan Cruz Pedroni write about ‘El cuerpo de una Colección’, the new permanent exhibition by Fundacion Klemm, curated by Federico Baeza and Guadalupe Chirotarrab.

The notion of similarity seems to have a clear reference in the context of the exhibition: it refers to the use of photography as a reproduction, a faithful record of monuments and works. The connotations of the second term are, on the other hand, less evident, although they seem to point to the instants (or is it, perhaps, of places?) In which the alluded resemblance stops.

It is a simple gesture to locate Ensayos de apertura, the exhibition by Luciana Lamothe (1975) in the coordinates of a return to order that critics have even come to celebrate. 

"Imago Mundi" is the first individual in Galería 80m2, Lima of the Argentine artist Adriana Bustos, who takes her title from the cosmographic treatise of the geographer and theologian Pierre d'Ailly, which Columbus used on his voyage of discovery.

The retrospective exhibition of an artist who traversed historical conceptualism sometimes leaves the image of a collection of muted sites, a repertoire of vacant places. 

"Fragmentaria II" brings together seven pieces from different series by the Uruguayan artist Pedro Tyler, offering a synthetic overview of his work in his second solo show in Lima.

The proposals of Daniel Boccato (Campinas, Brazil, 1991) investigate the relationship between abstraction and figuration and are based on the investigation of the different discursive forms that pose language and form, suggesting other foundations that establish a new thinking with which to challenge any constriction. All this is reflected in Centinela, his last performance and specific project for the space Studies of the old tobacco factory in Madrid, where he follows another of the constants of his production: the breaking of any convention on formats and the preferential use of materials and objects of an industrial nature.

In her recent exhibition for the gallery in Madrid, Sandra Gamarra (Lima, Peru, 1972) returns to use the concept of imposition of Western thought, channeled through the appropriation of that vision in Latin America. Nonetheless, the exploration of cultural perception and assimilation are, in a certain way, habitual subjects of study in her trajectory. For the occasion, the space plays a fundamental role for the understanding of the proposal. This, although conformed by several pieces, works as a single environment where everything dialogues within the conceptual framework.

The Main Hall of the Usina del Arte houses an imposing installation by the Argentine artist Eduardo Basualdo, which can be seen until April 22nd.

Each new intervention made by Doris Salcedo (Bogotá, Colombia, 1958) reaffirms the commitment to narrative based on historical research, usually covered in a certain revisionism, which the artist has been practicing for years, especially focusing on everything that surrounds political violence and what it generates. This is also the case of Palimpsesto, the proposal of monumental character that has developed in the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid and with which it pays tribute to the victims of one of the most dramatic faces of immigration, those who left their lives risking it blindly in the Mediterranean Sea.

Under the care of guest curator Emma Lavigne, the 14th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art brings together a breadth of artists who echo the instability of these times. 

Marinho sculpts and molds to seek not only the shape that emerges between his hands but also the emptiness yielded—that which we may not see so easily, but that is as real as what we do see, and as much part of the work.

The exhibition De Nature en Sculpture shows how nature is perceived by contemporary artists—mainly, as source of inspiration and means of expression. Nature, whether reproduced or in its actual state, is, here, turned into sculpture, and vice versa. Engaging our emotions, the artists summon nature in all of its forms and reveal through their visions its many facets (peaceful, turbulent, sublime, and vexing).

Surreptitious Stripes, an exhibition of work by Francisco Masó (Havana, 1988), was held from July 20 to August 19 at the Connect Now Room of the Arts Connection Foundation in Miami.

Candría’s images suggest the space in a distance not only geographic, but also temporal. On the basis of a series of images taken in Iceland and California, the artist reconstructs the phases of a journey that wanders in memory and imagination.

The show Slow Motion features the most important outgrowths of the creative universe of an artist that invites the viewer to take a new look at the art of movement.

 Ananké Asseff continues investigating topics that have concerned her in earlier works, specifically the complexity of human interactions and the place of the individual, with its baggage of experiences and memories, within those interactions. 

Scar Cymbals is Huanca’s world developed by means of a fluid dialogue between setting and architecture, sculpture and performance. 

The exhibition by Argentine artist Marcia Schvatz can be visited at Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat Art Collection until January 2017

Beyond specific description, Agustina Woodgate’s works are of interest because the product of careful research; they are objects that set off a poetics that brings to a halt the relentless mechanism of late capitalism and its complex socioeconomic system to open up interstices of subjective flight.