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 [...]
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.[...]
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.[...]
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.[...]
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.[...]
Another great article from our West Coast friends over at DailyServing written by Catlin Moore. Have fun! Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photo credit: Brian Forrest In a former life, Walead Beshty may have rubbed elbows with Patti Smith. Flaunting her contemptuous disregard for the cautionary advice of her peers, Smith famously denounced words as [...]
As I walked into the interior patio that gives way to the gallery space, I came across an old barrel organ player. At times considered ancient technology, the instrument’s surfaces were scared by the passing of time, but its pipes could still harmonize tunes. On its sides, the barrel organ player had a series of keys. I proceeded to play the keys on the barrel organ. A gallery attendant -possibly disrupted by my melody- approached me to teach me how to play the instrument. He explained that the keys were the invitations of the art exhibition I came to see. The keys were left behind the night of the opening, when guests had the opportunity to play their invitations in the order they pleased. Suddenly, I recognized a familiar disrupted song. This is how I began the process of engaging with Anri Sala’s first solo show at the Kurimanzutto Gallery in Mexico City, by playing The Clash’s Should I Stay of Should I Go, which echoes throughout the gallery space and in other places in the city intervened by Sala as part of the exhibition.[...]
Revealing the unseen world of how mail is delivered to the farthest corners of the UK, Royal Mail gave Tim Knowles unique access to its delivery system. Creating an artwork that captures the experience of a parcel in the post – carried by foot, Royal Mail vans and trucks, a Boeing 737-300 cargo plane, a small Shorts 360 propeller Aircraft and a ferry – this object traveled 20 hours 22 minutes. A specially constructed parcel recorded its own 902-mile journey through the postal system from London to the Isle of Barra, in a sequence of 20,000 images, a continuous audio recording and a GPS track.[...]
Casa Rota is literally a house, but also an exhibition space in Levittown, Puerto Rico where exhibition maker Bryan Arocho presented last week a collection of small format collages titled Violation. At a time when alternative art venues seem to be anonymously sprouting amongst galleries and art institutions, it seems necessary to reveal alternate ways to exhibit works in a rapidly changing dire economy. This is one of the places where art is happening, but few seem to know about.[...]
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Fabio Morais
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Zombie: A Mindless Affair at Antena
Martin Creed at Hauser & Wirth
La que alumbra es la de alante
Iván Navarro
Wim Delvoye