Al Calor del Pensamiento
Daros Latinoamerica Collection. Fundación Santander. Boadilla del Monte
We are not going to discover at this stage the effort and hard work invested by the Daros Latinamerica Collection into putting together holdings that cover the best of Latin American art. For this reason, taking into consideration the large number and excellent quality of the works that comprise the collection, the curatorial task including the selection of works carried out by Katrin Steffen for this exhibition featured by the Santander Foundation in Boadilla del Monte, a town located in the center of the Community of Madrid, is particularly note worthy. Indeed, through the works on display, the exhibit has succeeded in offering a detailed vision of the current status of contemporary art in Ibero America, exemplifying each of its main trends and including the innovative aspect that some of the works in this show have been exhibited for the first time.
The itinerary opened with a wooden pomegranate with protruding drawers, featured by the Cuban art collective Los Carpinteros in front of the entrance presided by Betsabeé Romero’s imposing Carro ayate, an installation originating in a happening , in which a Ford Victoria previously sent to cross the border between Mexico and the United States illegally becomes the artist’s denouncement of and commitment to her country’s social problems. The tour continued along a space transformed into a sort of cabinet where Carlos Amorales had displayed his series of silhouettes and his infinite and ominous butterflies. As if confronted with a deceitful vision, the spectator observed at the end of the corridor José Damasceno’s disquieting work, El presagio siguiente, through which the author sought to produce a physical stimulus. In that same section, the Colombian artist Óscar Muñoz was represented by Aliento, a work in which interaction was essential to discover feelings associated to life and afterlife.
Argentine art was represented by leading figures such as Leandro Erlich, whose work Las puertas showed the artist playing with optical illusions and with the participation of the public, as is customary in his proposals; Jorge Macchi and his collages; or Liliana Porter and her engravings. Besides the already mentioned work by Damasceno, the Brazilian trends represented by the work of Cildo Meireles and by Vik Muniz’s WWW World Map shared the exhibition space. The complete roster, which included such names as Belkis Ayón, Gonzalo Díaz, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Oswaldo Macia Gómez, Marco Maggi, Marta Minujín, José Alejandro Restrepo, Miguel Ángel Rojas, Doris Salcedo and Humberto Vélez, gives an idea of the accurate represen- tation of trends, the vast geographic context and the time periods the Daros Collection encompasses, since despite its inclusion of younger artists albeit all of them established ones it does not forget the great masters. On this occasion, the curator assigned a distinguished place in the itinerary and in the role of great masters to Julio LeParc, who broke with part of the traditional dialogues with his work Lumières alternées and began to experiment with light and motion, and León Ferrari, represented by a series of drawings by means of which the artist criticizes the uncontrolled growth of large urban centers and the chaos it entails. Featuring a didactic display that managed to achieve the always difficult goal of exemplifying through simplification, the exhibition was a perfect example of the way to show the essence of the development of Latin American art in the past few decades.
