DaWire

Puerto Rican Artist Christto Sanz who currently resides in Doha, Qatar has realized his first exhibition in the Middle East. In collaboration with the South African artist Andrew Jay Weir they have developed a project that concludes with the principle idea of an extended identity. With a touch of irony and humor they present different personalities with different elements that demonstrate a shared identity between the “East” and the “West”. [...]

Rafael Miranda, participative action.

“The future is there,” Cayce hears herself say, “looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.”

William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

If we are today merely fiction, then, the narrative of life begins to unfold in the interstices of time, space and distance. Science fiction, or perhaps we should consider it just fiction, attempts to collapse the temporal space between the present and the future. [...]

Installation view

Duplicitous Storytellers is an exhibition whose point of departure posits rewriting as a conceptual strategy. A repositioning of the notion of the author— the product long-standing research on the construction of genre and figures, as well as historical and artistic movements—resounds in a dialogue among exhibition pieces.[...]

Five special projects featuring Puerto Rican artists are currently on view at the Museo de Arte de Ponce. Curated by Arlette de la Serna, Cuerpo Presente presents visually engaging approaches to the body that are not only corporeal approximations, but also expand to critical interpretations of politics, culture and spirituality. The exhibition features works by Adal Maldonado, Elsa María Meléndez, Norah Hernández and Jaime and Javier Suárez.

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Form Follows Function was the title of the joint exhibition of New York-based Puerto Rican artists Christopher Rivera and Hector Arce-Espasas at METRO. The works on view seemingly elude the basic premise of the phrase, identified with 20^th century industrial design, architecture and Modernism, where most function seemingly defies and revolts from any real and present form. Form is then instinctive but controlled, where meaning is transgressed through process, resignification and the reconciliation of binary opposites. As many contemporary artists, both Rivera and Arce-Espasas create fictionalized realities, where form is not only an aesthetic choice but also a conceptual one.[...]

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 [...]

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.[...]

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.[...]