Reviews

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.

In the book-object Negro el 10, the last collaboration between Julio Cortázar* and Luis Tomasello, the writer accurately describes the artist’s creative procedure. He states that “…

Karina Peisajovich’s recent exhibition, entitled “The eyes, sometimes”, features in the manner of an exploration of the intimate process of creation, the three possible scenarios: the studio, the encounter with nature, and the experience itself as a space for reflection.

The critical attitude towards the establishment and towards the power to hurt of some photographs based on an equivocal notion of aging and beauty define, on the whole, the view conveyed by Aurora Molina’s work.

Like the first exhibition bearing the same title, which we could visit in 2010 and with which this show shares a contradictorily paradoxical spirit, the present exhibit opens with a series of graffiti leading to the gallery entrance. As in the previous show, we are overcome by a feeling of being in the presence of something that is not consistent − the words optimism and radical do not seem to work very well together.

Decadence is, without a doubt, one of the most defining traits of contemporary society. This feeling of deterioration which, in the opinion of Fredric Jameson , is a premonition of Post-Modernism itself, invalidates our capacity to predict with any certainty in what direction we are moving.

The installation 2iPM009, 2009, by the Venezuelan artist Magdalena Fernández (1964) is currently being shown at the Frost Art Museum, Florida International University, after its tour of the 10th Cuenca Biennial, and it will later travel to the Museum of Latin American Art in California.

Although the works range from painting to video installation, and although the artists are from Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Colombia, “An Other Place” reverberates a collective sense of displacement.

The exhibition “Soto. Paris and Beyond, 1950-1970” curated by Estrellita Brodsky, brings together twenty years of work by the Venezuelan master painter Jesús Soto (1923-2005).