Reviews

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.

The vindication of the Peruvian Jorge Eduardo Eielson (Lima, Peru, 1924) looks fundamental, far beyond any framed motivation in the round figures of the anniversaries. However, the work being done around the centenary of his birth shows a titanic effort to explore one of the most versatile artists in the plastic arts and, perhaps in his best-known aspect, in the literature of contemporary Peru.

The geometry in Jorge Cabieses' (Lima, Peru, 1971) usual outline is broken with the action of the spontaneity of the curved and almost organic stroke in his second solo exhibition in the Spanish capital. The Lima-born artist thus proposes, in a certain way, a dialogue between the artificial of the synthetic and the atavistic through the incorporation of those more spontaneous brushstrokes over the usual framework of rectitude that the artist usually presents.

Two decades after Miguel Ángel Rojas (1946, Bogotá, Colombia) conceptualized in his project David Quiebramales his denunciation of violence and the use of education as the most efficient vehicle towards a catharsis for those who suffer it, the Madrid headquarters of La Cometa revisits his most emblematic work and reinterprets it as the framework for a kind of thematic retrospective. This commemoration of that first David Quiebramales reinforces a view that is still difficult to overcome and that, even today, serves to trace those harmful social dynamics that are created between society and war, the institutional and the political systems.

Until this April 2024, one of the recent galleries of the Pinacoteca Contemporânea - the new annex of the traditional and active Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, which opened in 2023 - has become a special locus, where past and future, tradition and modernity, nostalgia and dazzle, fortress and ruin, among other poetic axes, present themselves to a visitor who is between perplexity and fascination. The author of this suspension of time is the Chinese artist Cao Fei (Guanghzou, 1978), one of the key artists of the contemporary world, who has her first solo show in South America, after (more discreet) appearances at the 29th São Paulo Biennial (2010) and the 9th Mercosul Biennial (2013), in Porto Alegre, in the south of the country.

MIAMI

ROSAS Ek Balam gallery, based in Buenos Aires, presents works by Vicente Grondona and Max Gómez Canle in the RADAR section of Pinta Miami. Entitled Épica del paisaje (Epic of Landscape), this exhibition invokes the fragmentation of reality.

El Dorado: Myths of Gold is an extensively researched, impeccably installed exhibition featuring one-hundred objects and artworks from the Pre-Columbian period to the 21^st century by sixty artists.

MIAMI

Amazonia is a Pinta Miami project curated by Félix Suazo that proposes a visual expedition through the Amazon, crossing countries, cultures and ecological identities. As a Special Project, Amazonia emphasizes Pinta's commitment as an international platform for Latin American art.

Based on futuristic tales, Guadaloup Vilar created an entire universe where life and art are supported by death. Completely functional to organic and cohesive development, Guadaloup’s artworks and installations reshape the notion of expiration.

The experience proposed by Martina Servio Olavide is composed of two parts, one that invokes dying and the other, as an organic counterpoint, living. The first, "dying", is represented by a non-naturalistic play, while the second, "living", manifests itself as an exhibition in an art gallery. Through these two dimensions, the artist challenges the viewer to question their understanding of self and others, and to explore a wide range of interpretations.

From September 13 to November 15, 2023, Venezuelan artist Pedro Medina inaugurated his first solo show in Spain, with Cerquone Gallery, at its headquarters in Madrid. Entitled Gran Turismo: Simulaciones Simultáneas (Big Tourism: Simultaneous Simulations), the exhibition is conceived as an exhibition of recent work on a process of observation of speed and resistance in painting.