AN EXHIBITION THAT ASKS QUESTIONS TO THE ISLAND, AT DIABLO ROSSO

On March 21, Diablo Rosso will inaugurate Preguntas a la Isla (Questions to the island), an exhibition by Argentine artist Irene Kopelman, whose practice unfolds in an intermediate territory between scientific observation and art. “Her work does not seek to represent a landscape, but to learn how to look at it: to remain long enough for perception to change its nature,” states the exhibition text.

The artist develops indices, cuts, and variations that function as devices of attention, emerging from prolonged stays on Barro Colorado Island, STRI. “Traditional artistic media cease to be surfaces of representation and become tools for research: to observe, collect, compare, and look again.”

Preguntas a la Isla does not fix the environment; rather, it operates as an archive of successive observations.

Irene Kopelman was born in Córdoba, Argentina, in 1974. She studied at the School of Arts of the National University of Córdoba, where she obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Painting (1994–2002). In 2002, Kopelman was accepted into the two-year international residency program at the Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. She currently divides her time between Amsterdam, Argentina, and the regions to which her work and research take her.

In the Netherlands, Kopelman began researching representations of landscapes as recorded by naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After several years working with museum collections, she became curious about the process of confronting the landscape firsthand.

Kopelman has always believed in drawing as a tool for understanding the world around her and in art as a form of knowledge. Her proximity to institutions led her to observe the methodologies of scientists working in the field, sparking her curiosity about how they frame and organize a subject that is vast, essentially dispersed, extremely dynamic, and often too hidden to grasp or approach all at once.

Diablo Rosso is a creative think tank located on Avenida Central in Panama City. It is also a community that supports and promotes artistic talent in its broadest and most multidisciplinary sense. Created in 2006 to help fill the existing gap in emerging artistic practices in the region, it has established itself as a space for empowerment and encouragement, fostering public appreciation for contemporary art while primarily generating social impact within the surrounding community.