Reviews

The Mexican artist Teresa Serrano just opened her first solo exhibition in Spain at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM), in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

Doris Salcedo (b. Bogotá 1958) requested Tate Modern not to repair completely the concrete floor of its Turbine Hall, fissured for her installation in 2007. The giant crack − which earned her European acclaim − was only filled, leaving a visible scar that still reminds us of the abyss that exists between the value of life in the north and in the south, in the First World and in its periphery.

Guillermo Kuitca’s (Buenos Aires, 1961) London solo show at the prestigious Hauser & Wirth Gallery marked the definitive presence of Latin American art in the British capital. Kuitca, who has shown in the course of his career a growing interest in maps and architectonic diagrams, incorporated on this occasion new central motifs to his cartographic traces aimed at questioning the perception of the social spaces we inhabit.

The Spanish photographer Isabel Muñoz knew “La Bestia” (“The Beast”) closely and portrayed its entrails. This was the name given by immigrants from Central America – mostly from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador – to the freight train which has, for years, transported those who traveled northward through Mexico, trying to reach the border with the United States as stowaways.

After years of mentioning Minuphone every time I wrote about Marta Minujín − for example, in Arte al Día 134, when referring to her retrospective in 2010 −, the author of these lines confirmed the playful sensory effects of the telephone booth created by the artist in 1967.

Circles, squares, pentagons, waves and lines moved in undulations and rhythm to the pull of transparent, mechanized nylon threads that triggered their choreographed movement.

“Friends with Benefits” , curated by Carla Camacho and Drew Moody, translated into a clinical and incongruous presentation of painting, collage, sculpture, an installation and two videos, at Lehman Maupin’s Lower East Side gallery.

Present-day art breaks barriers later to confine itself within new boundaries. It confuses the viewers, induces them to reflection, and shows the unreasonableness that surrounds them. Carlos Amorales − Mexico 1970 − has this capacity to make people reflect about someone or something.

For Félix Curto (Salamanca, España, 1967), Mexico is inherent in his way of viewing the world. During over ten years he has completed residencies in that country, where he has been exposed to a social and cultural reality that has fascinated him, exploring a political and economic world that is surely not to be found anywhere else in the world.

Perfomance artist Regina José Galindo (Guatemala City, Guatemala, 1974) may be considered a fundamental figure when attempting to understand action art in Central America and the influence of the eternal violence floating upon the countries of the region.

A print is a drawing, and that is perhaps the most important thing about it; yet it is a drawing in which technique plays a leading role. The technique used in printmaking is laborious and complex, and its end result is always enveloped in mystery and unpredictability.

The new generations abide by icons and images: they try to convey ideas. Each artist, in his/her day, has a particular concern; at present these concerns are marked by a modernism that is dissolving. Cinthia Marcelle nourishes a temperament pervaded with irony.

The installation presented by Pablo Reinoso in Fundación YPF’s space, Arte en la Torre, provides the viewer with a double gratification: The work Fútbol 5 en la Torre adds to the great power of visual attraction the narration of the creative process, an explicit testimony of the work’s gestation written by the artist himself.

In the face of the power of the new multimedia text supports, the beautiful volume Ricardo Piglia-Eduardo Stupía. Fragments of a diary appears as a statement on the permanence of the printed book. Piglia (Argentina, 1941) has kept a private diary for over 50 years and Stupía (Argentina, 1951) has been in the public scene since his first solo show in 1973. At the intersection of the artistic sensibilities of these authors, volume and show share the intensity of poetry and the fertile discomfort of critical thought.

The work presented by Moris (Israel Meza Moreno) is a constant double play, a sort of glossary around the daily life of Mexico City simultaneously altered, infringed, evidenced, and whose risk zones or stability are increasingly less identifiable.

Even though he was very creative since he was a child, it was not clear to Jesús “Bubu” Negrón – one of the most important conceptual artists of his generation in Latin America – “what being an artist was about.” He discovered it as an art student in San Juan, when he intervened in a totally abandoned bronze statue – a sculpture of Puerto Rico’s first world champion, Sixto Escobar.

Perhaps one of the most controversial careers in Latin American avant-garde is that of Colombian-Brazilian artist María Thereza Negreiros (Maués, 1930); her itinerary evolves in an unusual way in the artistic contemporary movement of the continent.

The works of Venezuelan artist Clemencia Labin (Maracaibo, 1946), who has lived in Germany for over 20 years, maintain strong links with her home town, as well as references from it, both concerning the thematic and the formal aspects, in spite of the distance and the time gone by since she left it.

Leticia Ramos is not a photographer in the traditional sense. While her medium is photographic, with images and light printed on a surface, she is more concerned with documenting the impact the world has on a lens, or the absence of a lens, and the passage of time and variations of color as subject matter.

The sculptures of Amilcar de Castro all stem from the same basic procedure of cut and fold. He mastered the technique of turning hard metal into what appeared to be mere sheets of paper, surfaces that seem almost pliable and end up that way after strenuous efforts.

Luisa Richter (Germany, 1928) once told us that one of the reasons why she did not leave Venezuela was her attachment to her house and her fascination for the light of the tropics.

Photography-based works by Susy Iglicki tie together very diverse space-historical times, showing how the river of blood that crosses the history of the world tends to bury the signs of identity. Her art tries to make us see, to re-humanize.

It is always a privilege when someone opens that whimsical window that leads to the unsuspected inner world of each human being. This is exactly the risk and the joy afforded by the exhibition “A little window inside my head”, by Cuban artist residing in Miami Ana Albertina Delgado.

Antonia Eiriz used to refer to Guido Llinás’s grocery store, where the works of Cuban abstract painters were kept − forgotten for almost twenty years − as “the catacombs of Cuban art”, and the fact is that the history of abstract art in Cuba reflects one of the most difficult paths within the panorama of the visual arts of the island, since this art was faced more often than not with rejection or incomprehension, or with downright oblivion.