Reviews

Last October, in her third and most recent exhibition “ Constructions” at Cecilia de Torres Gallery, Argentinean born Marta Chilindron presented a series of seven new works - all of which emphasize and highlight trademark themes in her art of the last few years: movement, geometry, responses to light and the difference between perception and reality.

Finland, Op. 26 is the official title of a symphonic poem written in 1899 by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. At that time, Finland was under Russian dominion, and the piece, composed for an event organized by the local press, which was subjected to a rigorous censorship, immediately became a hymn incarnating opposition to foreign rule, and more specifically, to censorship and oppression.

From May 5 through June 16, visitors will have the chance to appreciate for the first time in New York, artist Hélio Oiticica’s (Rio de Janeiro, 1937-1980) installations Penetrável PN1, Penetrável Filtro and Penetrável PN28 “Nas Quebradas” at Galerie Lelong.

Nayda Collazo-Llorens’ latest works displayed in her individual show at LMAKprojects are so fascinating, complex and inquisitive as usual.

Eduardo Stupía has been in the public eye ever since his first solo show held in 1972 at the legendary Lirolay gallery. Writer Ricardo Piglia (Argentina, 1941), whose most recent novel, Blanco nocturno (Anagrama, 2010) obtained the Dashiell Hammett Award, the National Critics’ Award (Spain), the Rómulo Gallegos and the Casa de las Américas awards, has kept a private diary for more than fifty years.

Fernanda Laguna, a paradigmatic artist of the 1990s whose artistic talent was many times pushed into the background by her brilliant role as a cultural manager, is presenting the brief retrospective “Don’t trust what you see” at Nora Fisch Gallery.

As a heart-felt paradox and a homage, Mirtha Dermisache (Buenos Aires, 1940-2012) is included among the seven artists of the exhibition Color - instructions for use.

According to the Gospels, after Jesus’ death and resurrection he appeared before his disciples. Thomas was not present on that occasion and he did not believe when the other apostles told him what they had seen.

I became very interested in the seriousness and the rigor of the work of Erica Sogbe (Venezuela, 1979), her analytical capacity at the time of proposing new reading strategies for the construction of the relationship between form and the formless;

As a foretaste of what will be displayed at the Havana Biennial as of May, Magnan Metz has assembled the latest – and perhaps the most audacious – works of Alexandre Arrechea.

The Center for Puerto Rican Studies (Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños), founded almost forty years ago, is a research-based institute with a vast and invaluable collection of materials documenting Puerto Rican life and culture in New York.

Iran do Espírito Santo was born in 1963 in the city of Mococa, Brazil. As a teenager, he worked in a photography lab processing black and white prints, which was to later greatly impact his work.

Many times − and this occurs in the visual arts − we are presented with a complex narrative, occasionally anachronistic, or with a synthesis that verges on minimalism and forces us to imagine that which has not been depicted, or conversely, to depict the unimaginable.

As of at least 2002, when he began his series of street dwellers in London city, collectively titled Sitters, the work of Ricardo Alcaide (Caracas, 1967) explores the borderline character of the skin; it penetrates into the metaphorical richness of membranes (whether they be walls, blankets, plastic sheets, fences, or the skin itself) that separate the interior from the exterior, that divide one world from another world that is its obverse, its opposite.

In an interview with Felipe Ehrenberg (Mexico City, 1943) included in the catalogue of his exhibition, Manchuria, Visión Periférica (Manchuria, Peripheral Vision) (2006), Guillermo Gómez-Peña calls the indefinable artist (furiously Mexican in the first place, and then, universal) who prefers to call himself − like his father, Duchamp − an “artisano” (a play with words combining artisan/artist and “sano”/healthy), although his actual profession is that of “neologist”, inventor of logical systems of thought, that is, of languages, "my conceptual goD.F.ather."

A musician and painter, concerned with the human figure and the landscape, mural art and spontaneous symbols, the effects of light and the vibration of nuances, Leopoldo Torres Agüero was, in all the stages of his production, an artist inclined to experiment with form and color.

Undoubtedly, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, photography - although also cinema - has contributed to configure the identity profile of the major large cities of the world, which are privileged objects of its shots.

The sculpture in white tissue paper by David Maggioni from Santa Fe (Argentina, 1988), which inundates the new space of Ruth Benzacar Gallery, resembles a great and soft, peaceful white cloud.

Max Gómez Canle (Argentina, 1972) creates a magical atmosphere with marvelous paintings, unexpected volumes and delicate voids in Chambre Mentale, a show with a setting design that induces the visitor to observe all the works at the same time from a distance, verifying at first sight the outstanding amalgam.

The splendid exhibition “Gods, rites and trades of Pre-Hispanic Mexico” displays over 150 beautiful antique pieces from the cultures of the Gulf of Mexico.

It is an often told story that the Nazis confiscated gold during their pursuit of Jews in 1930s Germany and later detoured all the wealth they could amass to South America, hiding the valuable metal in the parts of tractors and even in submarines en route to countries like Chile.

Seen from far away, one of the pieces at Jac Leirner's retrospective show now on at Estação Pinacoteca in São Paulo looks like an all white minimalist composition, a Robert Ryman of sorts, discrete and almost about to disappear against the immaculate wall of the museum.

For several decades now, Ana Mercedes Hoyos has focused her attention on the cultural influence that a social minority, in particular the one of San Basilio de Palenque, can exert on our national identity as Colombians.

Governed by four thematic axes, the retrospective Comedy and tragedy 1948-2010 by Beatríz González, was presented at the Ciudad del Río venue of the Museum of Modern Art of Medellín.

The first impression when viewing Chema Madoz’s (Spain, 1958) images is one of surprise and perplexity. Then we will identify this impression with the surrealist touch in her work. At a later stage, we will dwell on the warmth of the grain and the compositional purity of the nuances ranging from white to black.

The term assemblage is derived from the French assemblage, which means to gather together, unite. So making an art of assemblage is a sort of act of love, inasmuch as objects of different natures are fused. And just like in any human corporal relationship, things will make sense if the mixtures work. Thus the artist of assemblage arises as a magnificent alchemist that processes wastes to turn them into art.

The institutional spaces to divulge the work of young artists are becoming progressively scarcer in Venezuela. For this reason we welcome the initiatives where new proposals can be shown. Sala CAF is sponsored by the Latin American Development Bank.