Reviews

The rising career of Héctor Maldonado (Puerto Rico, 1972) has achieved its first great institutional backing with the current exhibition at the Museo las Américas of a comprehensive compendium of his oeuvre under the suggestive title Welcome Home.

In Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), Roberto Bolaño described the way in which the real-visceralists, or viscerrealists, walk backward. How backward? Backwards, looking at a point in space but walking away from it, in a straight line towards the unknown.

Olivier Debroise’s work, even if not exhibited, illustrates the polyvalent quality of writing, of the executer and of the reader, and at the moment of showing himself to the public he links together and unleashes something which is not pointed out anywhere in museography or in history; something which has more to do with the act of cracking a nut open than with eating it in different recipes.

With Understory, exhibition of collages of the Argentinean artist Nina Surel, Praxis Gallery of Miami has entered the fall offering an impressive display of works which impose themselves because of their great format and sensorial impact.

In the visual tissue created in Concetto spaziale, Pedro Núñez’s solo show (Caracas, 1976), the artist reflects on the experience of art from the starting point of art itself.

Collecting art today implies a kind of dialogue between one’s own imaginary and that of the works that one chooses to be one’s own. That is to say, it implies building a bridge towards forms of collective iconography. This was very clear to Patricia and Juan Ruiz Healy from the first moment that a Rufino Tamayo fell into their hands.

From September 15 through December 10, visitors will have the chance to view the first solo exhibition in the United States of the Brazilian artist Antonio Manuel (b.1947, Portugal). The show focuses on Antonio Manuel’s preeminent role in the development of the groundbreaking neo-avant-garde movement that emerged in Rio de Janeiro during the 1960s.

The elevator is, in Leandro Erlich’s words, “a functional object, but in which life seems to be suspended between brackets. Recorded voices and music can step in to alleviate the inconveniences of the trip, but we cannot avoid each other in this space and consequently experience the Sartrean room of the ego. We are nobody, we are nowhere, we are not any person and we are not in any place”.

Exeunt. Of going out. Of leaving. Of running away. It is also the declaration of intentions of the Cuban Diango Hernández in his last show at Alexander and Bonin. Day´s End, the famous piece in which Gordon Matta-Clark cut out a cat’s eye shape in the façade of a New York building could be the escape way that Hernández is looking for.

The atrium of the Museum of Modern Art has been flooded by an ethereal sixty feet high (something over eighteen meters) cascade of a very sheer white fabric, with a slight undulation caused by the airflow and the interaction of the spectators, and more than developing in the space, it seems to try to contain it, fracture it, reinvent it, and at the same time accumulate in it, time.

Articulated in three parts, the exhibition presented two new working groups. The first, Corplegados, was a series of large format drawings. As in former works such as Havre-Caumartin (1999), Corplegados are the manifestation imprints of the body while interacting in specific situations.

El objeto sacrificado (The Sacrificed Object) is the title under which Alexandre Arrechea (Trinidad, Cuba, 1970) is presenting his first productions in graphite since the days when he had his formal training. After having experimented with various materials, he somehow readopts the one that is perhaps the most “academic”, to surprise the viewer with new concepts.

The search for limits in multiple dimensions and the investigation of space and its possibilities occupied during considerable time the thoughts of Matta (Santiago de Chile, 1911- Civitavecchia, Italy, 2002), interested in these concepts and in their application in the field of the visual arts since the days of his training as an architect.

The sad reputation that has pursued Ciudad Juárez in recent times, marked by a social and economic reality which, even though peculiar to that city, can be witnessed in other large Mexican urban centers along the border with the United States, is present on a daily basis in the newspapers or in the news broadcasted all over the world.

The following conversation between Emilio Chapela and me centers around several paintings, photographs, and sculptures at the Henrique Faria Gallery and the Pace/MacGill Gallery in NewYork.

To “think” contemporary art demands considering the recapitulation of ideas and concepts. Post-modernity has placed in the spotlight the recycling of philosophies, stands and concerns that allow the contemporary artist to become immersed, in a more realistic and effective way, in the study of the issues that make up and define the social physiognomy of his immediate reality.

Life makes no sense. That is why art exists. We are doomed to insist, to wish to remain, to persist through time, but our fate is to leave. We know this since childhood: in the future there will be a day when we will no longer be here. Although it makes no sense, life is an explosion of intensity.

By destruction I understand all those processes that show what we call losses. Traumas which in most cases explain a complete deracination of memories, but which inevitably leave a series of flashes of reminiscences along the way; semi invisible landmarks that evidence the idealization of a traveled road.

The consistency of the work produced by Juan Melé harmonizes with the exhibition space in the Galerie Argentine − Argentine Embassy. In a curatorial exercise detached from chronological organizations, the show develops organically amidst paintings, sculptures and engravings.

The exhibition Rogelio López Marín (Gory): Selected Photographs 1984-1994, permits a recapitulation of a crucial moment in contemporary Cuban art through an impeccable selection of this author’s most emblematic series, included in the Liza and Arturo Mosquera Collection.

One of the most important images of the Colombian cultural imaginary is that of the Tequendama Falls; nineteenth-century renditions by Alexander von Humboldt or Manuel María Paz have accompanied traveler’s books and books about Colombian history to our days.

In an interview with Jesús Soto conducted by art critic and curator Guy Brett in 1965, the artist commented on how difficult it was for the spectator to understand abstract art as something based on life itself.

Each time one has the chance to revisit Tunga’s (Palmares, Brazil, 1952) oeuvre, one may confirm both the passion he has for his work and the magic that the discovery of this passion produces.

Artist Hugo Lugo’s (Los Mochis, Sin, 1974) most recent exhibition in Mexico opened a few weeks ago at the MASIN (Sinaloa Art Museum), revisiting some of the pieces shown in “La superficie del precipicio” (The Surface of the Precipice) − his first museum solo show exhibited at the Nuevo León Center for the Arts, 2010.

The capacity for transformation that may be perceived in Omar Carreño’s works reveals, right from the start, the Utopian dream of any artist: that of being able to create a new order for the world.

Carola Bravo is an architect, art historian and artist. These characteristics are evident in her work in the field of the visual arts. For any architect or engineer, it is customary to work with contours in topography.

Catalina Parra (Chilean, born 1940) is a conceptual artist, whose career spans from the early 1970s to the present, addressing contemporary socio-political issues through the appropriation of images and language taken from mass media.