Reviews

The powerful painting of Starsky Brines (Caracas, Venezuela, 1977) has in his most recent production the consolidation of one of the most intense expressions of the Latin American panorama. Collected under the accurate epigraph of Paisajes imposibles (Impossible Landscapes), the exhibition invites the spectator to let himself be impacted and submerged in a world as unreal and dreamlike as it is sometimes grotesque. These adjectives, more typical of the symptomatology of the society that underlies each of the Venezuelan's pictorial interpretations, seem to originate in the different angles that converge in Brines' universe.

The world of Alfredo Castañeda (Mexico City, Mexico, 1930 - Madrid, Spain, 2010) is also the ours one. It can be said that, from his narrative poetry and his visual poetry, the Mexican artist accessed a universe that, although its protagonist might seem alien to us, is, in truth, the description through archetypes of a reality that surrounds us. The exhibition that Casa de America in Madrid dedicates to him can boast of compiling all those themes that give shape to those themes of mystical and surrealist character, of that fantastic touch that all life has and that passes through the filter of the experiences of each one and, in this case, of the language with which Castañeda captures it.

Widline Cadet (Pétion-Ville, Haiti, 1992) brings together in her life experience several of the aspects and themes that, perhaps, have inspired more production among all those curatorial lines with more presence. Her biography, constructed through childhood memories, the environment of a generation and a country marked by its own strong culture or the phenomena of emigration, constitutes the framework in which the photographer develops the practical integrity of her work.

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Ellsworth Kelly's birth, the Fondation Louis Vuitton pays tribute to the artist with the exhibition “Ellsworth Kelly Formes et Couleurs, 1949-2015”; the first exhibition in France to address in such a broad way the work of this essential creator of the second half of the 20th century, both for its chronology and for the techniques it brings together. Organized with the Glenstone Museum (Potomac, Maryland) and in collaboration with the Ellsworth Kelly Studio, it brings together more than a hundred works, covering a wide range of media used by the artist, from painting to sculpture, works on paper, collage and photography presented on the main and first floors of the Foundation.

There is something structural in the Museo La Neomudéjar that allows plastic initiatives such as those of Heriberto Nieves (Vega Alta, Puerto Rico, 1957) to acquire greater meaning thanks to the dialogue with the space offered by this Madrid institution.

Freedom First is the first solo exhibition that Fernando Bryce (Lima, Peru, 1965) presents at 1 Mira Madrid and is practically a declaration of intentions.

"If you hear a voice within you say, "you cannot paint," then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced".Vincent Van Gogh

Andres Serrano carries with him a sulfurous reputation that he has not tried to hide in this exhibition, where famous and forceful works are presented. Under the title “Portaits de L'Amérique” the Musée Maillol offers a survey of Serrano's “American” work from his earliest creations in the mid-1980s to his most recent.

The Green Havana project is a captured sample of a time and an attitude, the same one that transits between evasion and hedonism and the social reality of the Cuban capital, a unique and referential site of that almost isolated Cuba and of a popular culture grown in the shadow of political influences.

Standing before the expressive forcefulness of Mexican-American Robert Nava (East Chicago, USA, 1985) can be risky. At first glance, the primitivism in the technique used in his canvases is shocking in the conversion of the strength of the stroke and the basics of the gesture into a language that agglutinates a brute force. Perhaps for that reason, the usual tendency of those who face his work is to quickly pigeonhole it out of the academic, out of that refinement that is presupposed -although less and less- to those who fill the room of a museum, to let themselves be carried away by the urgency of expression in front of that pretended good taste.

For some time now, the Inéditos program carried out by La Casa Encendida -an institution of the Montemadrid Foundation- has become a more or less reliable thermometer of the emerging curatorial scene that has Spain as its epicenter. As a result of that consolidation, within that faithful reflection, the Spanish social and artistic structure itself plays a very prominent role.

History forms an invisible rhythm, resounding in the background of visual stories. Listen carefully and the past will also reveal its intrinsic connection with the future. “Which of these two constructs is the driving force, and which sets the tone of the current moment?” asks "The Fragility of the Ancestral Time," a group exhibition first shown at Casa Velazquez in Santo Domingo and now on view at the Avèle gallery in Cap Cana. Bordering on philosophical treatises, the exhibition provides great aesthetic pleasures.

In Brazil's largest open-air contemporary art center, with an enviable connection between nature and visuality, nautical elements have curiously been the driving force behind important commissioned works. Now at Inhotim, they are central to the metaphors that evoke previous unwanted flows of circulation and, at the same time, act as a reference so that they are not repeated - in this case, the slave trade originating in Africa, whose survivors worked, among other activities, in the exploitation of minerals that sustained the economy of this part of Brazil, today, Minas Gerais.

On Thursday, April 18, 2024, the exhibition project Trámites, a duo-show by visual artists Yéssica Montero (1998, Dominican Republic) and Ernesto Rivera (1983, Dominican Republic), opened at the independent spaces of La Sociedad, in Santo Domingo.

Héctor Canonge began to explore the possibilities of performance almost without being aware of it. With an extensive career in the field of new media and the art surrounding these technologies, and almost by inertia, he incorporates the use of his body in one of his installations, Schema CorpoReal, where his body covered by bar codes was scanned by the public so that, through texts that emerged referring to parts of his body, they ended up constructing a narrative of identity.

It could have been an ordinary retrospective, but the decision to participate in some way in the creative process is a differential and even declarative point in Tembló acá un delirio, the exhibition that Museo CA2M in Móstoles delves into the figure, and at first hand, of Ana Gallardo (Rosario, Argentina, 1958).

La Chola Poblete, Argentine artist and LGBTQ+ rights activist, draws confrontation between historical stereotypes and contemporary visual languages. Her colourful works in diverse media disrupt prevailing power structures and celebrate the rich culture of South American Indigenous peoples. Titled after her hometown, Guaymallén is La Chola’s solo exhibition at PalaisPopulaire, curated by Britta Färber, head of Deutsche Bank’s international art and culture program.

The Fund for Park Avenue and its Sculpture Committee have invited two artists, Betsabeé Romero and Jorge Otero-Pailos to exhibit their sculptures on Park Avenue from March through October 2024. Their eight works are presented in conjunction with New York City (NYC) Parks’ Art in the Parks program.

The Seville-based Fundación Valentín de Madariaga y Oya raises in its collective exhibition Herencia. Proyecto 360º the need to reconsider actions and return to the essential and almost primary link through the observation and analysis of our environment and its possibilities. The show gathers the work of fifteen international artists who become instrumental through their works for this purpose.

The NEXT section of Pinta PArC 2024 is set as a window to the Latin American emerging art scene, tracing a profound dialogue between diverse artistic systems and a dynamic collaboration with six galleries: Vigil Gonzales (Cusco and Buenos Aires), Salón Comunal (Bogotá), Enhorabuena Espacio (Madrid), Remota (Salta), Constitución (Buenos Aires) and Paseolab / Galería del Paseo (Lima and Punta del Este).

Bosco Sodi (Mexico, 1970) explores deeply in El día que nos volvimos a encontrar a universe quite distant from his recognizable large format and liveliness production to delve into the pleasures of the search for new material expressions and the abandonment of the chromatic in favour of texture, the depth of the absence of colour and concept.

In the next edition of Pinta PArC 2024, Herlitzka & Co. (Buenos Aires) and Henrique Faria (New York) join forces to present a booth proposal that challenges conventional notions of contemporaneity and ancestry in Latin American art.

Flavio Garciandía (Caibarién, Cuba, 1954) becomes the active and passive subject of his work in his first solo exhibition in Madrid.