THE HALL OF CAPRICES
With a free opening to the public on March 7th, the Modern Museum of Buenos Aires (MAMBA) presents El Salón de los Carpichos (The Hall of Caprices), an anthological exhibition of the Buenos Aires artist Max Gómez Canle (Buenos Aires 1972). Conceived, not as a retrospective, but as a linear journey through the formal and narrative influences that Gómez Canle reveals in his works, the exhibition immerses itself in the history of art from its own production and establishes a dialogue with the trade of creating images and the reminiscence of these in the unconscious.
Consecrated within a generation of painters who assumed great popularity during the late 90s and early 2000s, where along with Juan Becú, Alejandro Bonzo and Nahuel Vecino earned the name of Los Caballeros del Caballete (Easel Knights), Max Gómez Canle is an artist with a prolific career in the contemporary Argentine and Latin American scene. Being one of his largest and most important exhibitions in his career, the Ruth Benzacar Gallery (Buenos Aires) and Casa Triângulo Gallery (San Pablo) artist brings an unprecedented exhibition to the Modern Museum of Buenos Aires.
"El Salón de los Caprichos," explains Gómez Canle, "is almost like a large installation, like a large painting room where you can immerse yourself into the painting of all times, but from my own work." The paintings collected date from 1999 to his most recent productions. Collecting all that material, the exhibition does not extend chronologically, but in relation to the formal and narrative elements that each piece has. In this way, the viewer is introduced to the different traditions of painting, but from the hyperrealistic and almost always figurative landscape of Max Gómez Canle.
On the one hand, in terms of its installation nature, the artist stressed that the entire exhibition is subject to a dialogue that this anthology establishes with a new proposal: a large painting exhibited in the center of the room, "as if it were the background of all my paintings, where they can all enter, " he suggested. This is a novelty in the production of Gómez Canle and his narrative processes since his paintings and sculptures always acquired medium dimensions, of “human sizes” he explained in another opportunity.
On the other hand, and emphasizing the validity of painting as a producer of the visual and fantastic imaginary of human beings and societies, a subset of works under the label Los Fósiles (Fossils) is exhibited in the backroom of the museum. What motivated this B side of the sample is, precisely, the reflexive approach to pictorial production. In words of the artist: "Think about my own production and the imagery of the painting itself in a future fossil state". This series, then, is arranged as a kind of radiography or sediment of Gómez Canle’s landscapes. "They are the rest that can come to leave these images, and that ability they have to remain in the retina."
El Salón de los Caprichos will remain in the museum until August 11th. Not only is an excellent opportunity to appreciate the work of one of the referents of contemporary Argentine painting, but it is also the opportunity to experience a journey into a genuine and unknown universe.
