DaWire

Hey there! Below you can find the catalogue essay for the exhibition The Dialectic City: Document | Context that closed last November at Laboratorio de Artes Binarios. Enjoy!

-Carla Acevedo-Yates

“To capture a city in an image means following its movement.” Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant

The city is comprised of colliding elements; conflicting mechanisms that through movement create situations and actions. In constant flux and development, these dialectical relationships1 or strategies can be interpreted and reconsidered in spatial or temporal terms. Any given building in a city, measured through its façade and structural components, undergoes constant shifts in perspective defined by social, political or economic changes in the urban fabric. Insofar as social relations are concerned, we can sense a city’s identity, culture and problematics through its streets, collected debris, people, and things. The city is not a place of permanent encounters or exchanges, but a site of temporal conversations, actions and situations. It is always changing, constantly moving. To deny movement in the city would be to deny its very substance and subsistence; movement itself being difficult to imagine without space and time. Read the rest of this post »

Rabindranat Díaz-Cardona, Hábitat, installation view

Two separate solo shows will open this week at METRO: plataformaorganizada in San Juan; Habitat by Rabindranat Díaz-Cardona and El pah-pay lone by Héctor Madera-González. Both artists live and work abroad, Díaz-Cardona in Madrid and Madera-González in Brooklyn, New  York. For Díaz-Cardona, this is his first solo presentation in over four years. Read the rest of this post »

It’s interesting to read an in-depth conversation with an artist that really gets to the core of their practice and the choices that lead to their relevance in art history. The Conversation series published by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros presents readers with an innovative approach to an artist’s work and process through intimate and candid conversations between artists, curators and writers. The first of its kind to showcase leading artists and intellectuals from Latin America. Read the rest of this post »

Guillermo Rodriguez

Saturday, December 10th La Loseta, a year-long exhibition program initiated by artist Radamés “Juni” Figueroa, closed its exhibition cycle with Tropico Abierto, Gran Bienal Tropical, a project curated by London-based curator Pablo León de la Barra. Transforming the conventional sterile white cube into a jungle ‘green cube,’ de la Barra and friends staged a series of works and interventions at the beach in Piñones (Puerto Rico) and the area surrounding Kiosko La Comai; a typical beach front kiosque serving local food and drinks. Read the rest of this post »

Red, white and blue… these three colors when combined elicit multiple significations and visual connotations. They can be associated with a specific country, a patriotic sentiment, or a consumer brand, but in Omar Obdulio Peña Forty’s work they embody a practice of everyday life; the barbershop and its long-standing history as a place of congregation at the intersection of differing trades. La brega plural, Peña Forty’s most recent exhibition at METRO:plataformaorganizada, gathers a selection of recent videos, sculptures, paintings and photographs that approach the barbershop as a plural space of creation and transformation, appropriating its aesthetic values and reconsidering it in an artistic context. Read the rest of this post »

Katinka Bock was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1976. She studied in Berlin, Dresden, Paris, and then at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, before coming to Paris in 2007 for a residency lasting several months at the Cité des Arts. Although she was based in Berlin, circumstances have led her to stay on in the French capital. Sculpture has always been at the heart of her studies and interests, though she has also experimented extensively with video, performance art and projects for public spaces. Since coming to Paris, she has ceased to work on collaborative projects, and she finds that the most fertile place for her is not her studio or house, but her mind itself. Read the rest of this post »

DaWire presents once more a conversation with Berlin-based artist Steve Schepens on the occasion of his solo show at Galerie Van de Weghe in Antwerp. A performance that involves smashing an octopus on a sculpture provoked our curiosity. Read on to find out more. Read the rest of this post »

Nothing like a Summer Storm, 2010, oil paint, acrylic paint, spray paint, plastic bags, fabric, glitter and color pencil on canvas, 48″x60″

Wavering between figuration and abstraction, Sebastian Vallejo’s paintings are precise but expressive exercises in light, form and color. In them, bright colors collide with defined forms and structures that, combined with a mixed media approach provide an engaging visual experience that rests in conflicting polarities. Read the rest of this post »

This past May the Fundación Juan March in Madrid closed the survey exhibition Cold America: Geometric Abstraction in Latin America (1934-1973). The exhibition gathered over 300 works by more than 60 artists, taking as a point of departure two very specific return trips from Europe that offered a chronological structure to the show; Joaquín Torres-García’s return to Uruguay in 1934, and Jesús Rafael Soto’s return to Venezuela in 1973. The exhibition’s strength lies in showcasing in an European institution a comprehensive visual tracing of the complex histories of geometric abstraction in Latin America; a legacy grounded on the aesthetic language of the European constructivist project which, renewed and transformed, thrived throughout Latin America well into the 1960s and 1970s. The title of the show, Cold America, alludes to the tradition’s rational and objective forms which revealed chromatic structures and experiments in a diverse array of mediums such as painting, sculpture, photography and architecture. Read the rest of this post »

Featuring both individual and collaborative works, Josué Pellot and Héctor Arce-Espasas play upon their shared heritage with a critique of tourism’s myth of Paradise. The artists reach beyond simple autobiography by embodying histories of art, family, commerce, heritage, and nationalism in a rich visual experience in Galleries 2.5 and 3. Illuminated pineapples become the embodiment of culture, transubstantiating the subject’s body into that of a delectable fruit. Both artists struggle with the alchemy responsible for transforming culture into consumable tourist objects. Their photographs, paintings, and installations express a desire to unravel the meaning of cultural objects and the dissemination of those meanings throughout the global marketplace. Read the rest of this post »