ARTICLES-SCULPTURE MAGAZINE

Juan Miceli: ThisIsNotAGallery

2011-12-30T14:01:00.000-08:00

http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag12/janfeb_12/janfeb12_reviews.shtml

HERNAN DOMPE – The last look (June 17-July 4, 2010) / The Instant (June 17-July 11, 2010), Recoleta Cultural Center, Buenos Aires

2011-05-31T10:30:00.000-07:00

First Published
June 2011
Sculpture Magazine
http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag11/jun_11/jun11.shtml
By Maria Carolina Baulo

Some artist`s works create a visual or conceptual impact, but others as Hernán Dompé create both. During June-July 2010 the Recoleta Cultural Center presented two exhibitions simultaneously, interacting in such a particular complementary way that even when they were both understandable separately, when analyzed as a group, it became something with a new perspective.

The last look consisted in an enormous serie of sculptures with pieces over 2 meters high, reliefs in pasteboard and paper, inspired by a tragic experience where Dompé lost his 25 years old daughter in 1999. Because of the pain, many months later the artist started working with these reliefs, which represent that final look over her dead body. And even with no idea of making a serie out if it, as time went by it turned into a homogeneous group, and still growing, like trying to set free something hidden but latent. Beautiful and solemn structures that when we approach and watch closely, we discover a dramatic story of suffer, love and the presence of tribute through the years. This exhibition was perfectly connected with The instant, an installation where a magnificent group of warriors faced the spectators in a defying way, like putting some stop to those trying to penetrate in the heart of their territory. Skinny characters in a human scale and even a little taller than a man`s media, they appeared with their war attributes, used to defend themselves from a hostile world. Strategically placed they displayed in the room where the final touch was given by a video reproducing drawings painted by the artist; the frame of the entire scene turned into a shinny dawn. The instant referred to that unique moment previous to action, an ephemeral or eternal moment according to our imaginary. For those familiarized with Dompé´s work, he already presented the warriors in other opportunities related with the Twin Towers tragedy or the horrendous wars in human history. This proposal alluded to the primitive and specially the colonization of America. Themes like the origin, the precarious, nature, they all play a fundamental role in his works and life style. These warriors aren´t violent or awake feelings of fear and distance in us. But they do demand respect though and carry a message related to the place each one of us occupies or should. The importance of being conscious of our responsibilities and personal battles, our own infernos and demons we should fight in order to be better people who enrich the others. That instant of introspection becomes an instant of decision, action and compromise. Just like when Dompé decided to do something with the pain that invaded him with Maria Mora´s death and turned it into pure creative fire. So these interpellant warriors push us so we face our own struggle within and we make a change. And we keep moving forward. I remember I asked him, how both series where connected and his answer was “The warriors help me so I can bare all this (regarding the last look)”.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1946, Hernán Dompé lives on Capilla del Monte in the province of Cordoba in Argentina; Sculpture Professor with more than 10 international awards in sculpture, individual shows in USA, Argentina, Panamá, México, Chile, Brazil, Italy, Cuba and also participated in several international fairs such as ARCO, arteBA, Art Miami, Arteamericas, FIAC, Art Chicago.

Dolores Casares: Past-Present

2010-09-29T10:22:00.000-07:00

Centro Cultural Recoleta
October 20 – November 15, 2009.
Sculpture Magazine, Obtober 2010
http://www.sculpture.org/redesign/mag.shtml

Dolores Casares dedicated the past 20 years to her activity as an artist, art teacher and coordinator and curator of art spaces. With several exhibitions in prestigious places such as the National Fine Arts Museum of La Plata, the San Martin Cultural Center, the Recoleta Cultural Center, the Standard Bank Foundation, Pasaje 17, the National Salon (Palais de Glace), the Argentine Consulate in Nueva York, Arteamérica (Miami, EEUU) and the Inter-American Art Fair (Caracas, Venezuela) and also many times awarded, the argentine sculptor works from a perspective which relates the solid objects with the presence of the tram and the interweave so characteristic of the textile art. But her work also connects with the op art and the kinetic art.

As a precedent to the pieces presented at the CCR last October-November, during 2003 the artist produced works where she related the body with the tram. Around 2007 she incorporated the embroideries, needles and transparent plastics, everything related to the register, the track of her familiar story. Her actual work emerges from an intellectual base where rationality shapes the information provided by the sensitive and practical experience gained over the years. Acrylic plaques pierced by needles, fishing lines inside spheres, acrylic cubes with subtle illumination and in motion. Structures create and transform the space around; certainly a way to shape the world. This kind of work bonds the empty and the full perfectly creating some sort of game between presences and absents. Kinetic-optic dialogues that appeal to us making us participate actively. A microclimate where the role of light is fundamental, not only because it determines the physical limits of the sculptures and because of its inherence to them, but also for creating an “habitat” from where we could submerge, see and being seen. Her influences are clear when we refer to the kinetic field: Henryk Berlewi, Víctor Vasarely, Heinz Mack, groups such as Recherche d’art Visuel, Martha Boto and Erwin Redl. Some of her recent works focus on the importance of light and movement as triggers of emotions and feelings which also have a solid rational investigation as background. Once again, there is a balance between a rational starting point, followed by a sensitive instance and finally synthesized in a complex structure which mixtures illumination, movement, acrylic objects, trams that shine in the dark, fluorescent strings, all together in an ascetic place where they can unfold the inner beauty within that apparent simplicity.

Something in her production permanently refers to a past that communicates with the present and later with an uncertain future. As the argentine painter Gonzalez Perrin wrote, “ the action of taking a needle, of sewing, embroidering, big scale suturing (…), oscillating between synchronic meanings, past-present, pain – pleasure and the will of taking the needle between the fingers to bond, reconstructing and repairing while at the same time it becomes aesthetic: an “artistic operation”.

Juan Batalla-An artist of the real and the trascendental worlds

2010-08-31T18:02:00.000-07:00

SCULPTURE MAGAZINE

September, 2010

http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag10/sep_10/sep10.shtml

The argentine artist Juan Batalla, has a peculiar work which connects art with the sacred; transforms his creations into icons which carry within the philosophy of the ancestral divinities of afro-Latin origin (orixás) as well as the personal history of the artist, specially in relation to his practice of bodybuilding. And it is important to highlight that both practices are disqualified as not honorable by the high culture; this complicates the way in which people approach to these “meta-cultures” when they are not related with the experiences they propose.

Batalla presents a mysterious world which participates of our reality and also interacts with a transcendental level; a dialectic communication where the circuit thesis -antithesis- synthesis closes in the art work. Works that combine certain aesthetic codes with the perception of a body –his own- which permanently changes. Experimentation emerges from that original nucleus where the abstraction of the spiritual and the figuration of the presence of corporeity combine. In almost every stage along his activity as an artist, his interest for abstraction and tridimensional structures prevailed: the inherent power of volumes and its magnificence, generate some sort of tension between the dense and the ethereal:”The plenitude that I felt by changing my body radically and developing physical strength to be able to participate in bodybuilding tournaments, were experiences I relate with the same passion I dig in every morning when I work in my workshop with the hammer in my hand”.

In his latest works, Batalla uses rubber from bicycle tires. Some ideas crucial: transportation, rolling, the movement of existence itself, the transit and passage between diverse worlds and states of conscious. Used tires act as memorials; they keep records, the track of time and the personal imprint, unique and irreplaceable. The tire´s tram, of textile appearance, preserve from a silent inner place, whatever is not visible in the images. Having experimented with rubber through geometry and constructivism and always with a tendency to the round circular forms which nurture one another as the cycles of life, his recent art works develop the combination of the opposite and the complementary: there is a hidden tension between the pieces hanging on the walls - connected as an organic framework - and those sculptures that appear to us with no recognizable forms. Bestiality and sensuality also play an important role when drawings and photography participate introducing the presence of a muscular body interacting with the rubber. Once more, the association body-ritual practice emerges clearly: the orixás are divinities free of prejudice, they embrace the erotic, humor and irony, against every rigid moral and religious concept that the occidental culture consolidated.

In 2001, Juan Batalla develops his craft as an artist, with huge public exposure. Since then, he participates in more than 20 individual and group exhibitions in diverse cities from Argentina and Uruguay and also international fairs such as ArteBA and ArtBO (Argentina and Colombia respectively). He also curated the exhibition “Owners of the Crossroad" at the Blanes Museum in Montevideo, Uruguay and at the Rojas Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, (2008-9). He is the co-Artistic and Editorial Director of the books “Owners of the Crossroad" (2007) and “"San La Muerte, a strange voice" (2004), and also received some international awards as the "Atabaque" Award, I.F.A., Uruguay (2002), among other activities. Therefore, his visual works are deeply related with those editorial projects he made together with the argentine plastic artist Dany Barreto, co-director of the Arte Brujo Collection, an investigation of several years which presents the combination of the interdisciplinary as a perfect combination of philosophy, anthropology, sociology and religion together with the contemporary art. As a specialist in the study of African artistic expressions, Juan Batalla’s works are influenced by Robert Farris Thompson, African-American Art Professor (University of Yale), curator and writer of several essays about Basquiat, Haring, Kuitca, among others.

These sculptures – some of which participated of his latest individual exhibition at the Recoleta Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, April 2010- explore the connection between primitive forms. Illumination becomes fundamental within this process; the volcanic sculptures made of wood covered by rubber, with a cover which hides in the inside an engine that activates the ascendant – descendent movement of those covers. All of his works influence one another; phallic forms appear with enormous intensity and refer to a masculine world. And even when black is the predominant color of the tires, rubber`s texture allows some sculptures painted in red, to become so realistic as flesh itself. That “alive” and organic effect generates empathy in the spectator and in the artist; nevertheless, the usage of robotic mechanisms produce the contrary effect, creating a definitive separation between the artist and his work.

Sculpture represents for Juan Batalla “a state of mind, a vibrating frequency from where I read reality and translate it into images”. His creations participate of the present times demands -with permanent need of the immediate - and also contemplates ancestral concepts, avoiding contemporary assumptions which sometime deny a philosophical reflection of the primitive, the essential and the nuclear. The special attention paid to lightness and weightiness relates with the works of Jose Bedia and Cornelia Parker, masters in pushing this resource to the limit. Batalla is an artist with a solid intellectual ground and dares to submit to new points of view his entire work, even when the sources of inspiration changed and there is no longer a clear identification with the influences of the past. He makes no vague interpretations or questions his choices, he lets his works go with the flow and trusts time will place them where they belong: “I see artists afraid of their own creations because they can´t make them fit into their own conceptual presumptions. Personally, I choose to set them free. It is better if they run before me”.
M.C.B

Tadeo Muleiro

2009-11-25T10:27:00.000-08:00

Sculpture Magazine

http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag09/dec_09/dec09.shtml

December, 2009

In contemporary art, innovation seems to be a rule. Artists are deeply concern in presenting and representing reality using creativity as a main tool that will lead them to reach a unique, outstanding and sometimes outrageous piece of work.
Tadeo Muleiro is a very young argentine artist who expresses his craft through the combination of millenary techniques, formal elements and material and above all, a powerful influence of ancient imaginaries. His enormous soft sculptures made of cloth, paper, hair, fiber-glass, bones and wood, painted with synthetic and acrylic paints, evocate symbolic shapes and forms that relate his work with the pre-Columbian cultures. The idea of sacrifice as transformation, of death as metamorphosis and mutation - part of the inevitable fluid of life -, dominate the entire concept of his art. Also colour allows him to create images he calls “sensitive expansive: shapes that invade the space and invite the spectator to actively participate”.

Several influences could be easily recognized in his works: Niki de Saint Phalle, Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Heredia, Ernesto Neto and literary manifests such as the ones of Oswald de Andrade. This connection shows when Muleiro defines some sort of “anthropophagi of the real”, an appropriation of the daily common objects which loose their functionality and become vital spirits; a fusion of ready-mades and experiences related to the Brazilian modernism of the XX century when Tarsila Do Amaral turned the art field into a complex scenario where reality and fantasy coexist. Irrationality together with clear ideas and powerful brilliant colours, interact to create solid works. In MASOTTATORRES Contemporary Art Gallery, Muleiro presented three pieces: “Bath”, clearly related to the theme of purification and birth; the“bathtub-tree” which linked heaven and earth, the center of the world, the bond between the complementary and the ceremonial site from where all the participating beings emerge. Such as trees, also snakes, jaguars, the sun, the rain and every symbol referring to fertility and Mother Nature, become crucial in his work. Not only Mexico or Brazil contemplate these symbolic expressions, also cultures in the north of Argentina relate to surreal visions, hallucinations produced when consuming drugs during initiative rituals. “The Son” would be the artist’s self portrait within an enormous vagina and the idea of birth appears once again; Tadeo Muleiro reborn. Finally, “The Sacrificial Priest”, an exquisite custom playing two fundamental roles: one as an aesthetic object itself and on the other hand, in live performances by the artist on stage, wearing it as if leading a religious ceremony: “ I am both victim and the one who sacrifices”, he said.

The constant balance between life and death acts as the controller of the creative impulse of the artist. He assumes an optimistic point of view, which understands the vital cycle of nature, as a never ending story. These colorful sculptures captivate us with the softness of their textures and the beauty of its looks and make us believe we inhabit some sort of playground. But what we are really looking at is to an attractive description of the main elements that create a cultural imaginary, mostly related to Latin-American people.

MASOTTATORRES Contemporary Art Gallery
http://www.masottatorres.com.ar/

Adrian Villar Rojas

2009-10-30T13:16:00.000-07:00

Sculpture Magazine-USA

November, 2009

http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag09/nov_09/nov09.shtml

Adrian Villar Rojas is an argentine artist who likes to be challenged; he doesn’t define himself as a painter or sculptor, but as an artist who wants to try it all and likes to work close to the border line; he plays the part of a director always pushing himself to the limit.
The artist constantly refers to the idea of making an archaeological installation as he pictures how the scenario of the end of the world would be like, also contemplating what might happen in hundreds of years when he’s no longer alive and all his remains, if any, still have a place in the planet. He wonders if he would be remembered, if it would be possible to reconstruct the main “moments” of his life like love, family relationships or his personal interests. The artist is deeply concern about death, time, loneliness, sadness, catastrophes and the human susceptibility to coincidences. He’s attracted to explore spaces and obsessed with the study of humans and their actions.
Villar Rojas combines impossible situations; time is the engine and not willing to let any moment slip away, he tries to capture each one of them in every ruin he creates or in the ancient fossils he mix with ordinary elements of our daily life. He makes monuments: “I make monuments because I’m not ready to loose anything”. An imaginary world becomes visible to the contemporary spectator, invited to interact within it.
Men from the Neanderthal Era, dinosaurs and all kind of animals, fantastic mutilated creatures deformed or dead, they all incarnate that world beyond human rationality where pain and destruction, but also redemption and persistence exist. Inside the space provided by the gallery Ruth Benzacar in Buenos Aires, we witness the end of the world and also the beginning of a new one. Elements co-exist in an incoherent habitat: photomontages, paints, remains of broken buildings, cars, a poor copy of Michelangelo’s David, acrylic butterflies, even a mosses with a baby’s figure in it. Chimneys built using construction material such as bricks, cement, sand and clay; water tanks made of fibro cement; enormous pieces of glass covering the floor; everything seems to play an important role in the installation but not in a dramatic way. They are all part of the surrealist landscape: “I heard someone said you could get hurt in my installation and I liked it because I thought the idea of taking a risk while entering in that place, was attractive”, said the artist.
Adrian Villar Rojas is always conscience of how compromising these kinds of projects are and how exposed he feels. He commits physically and emotionally as if that experience would be the very last one. In only 10 days he put the installation together and only the help of assistants was required when creating the enormous amount of clay sculptures, the small ones in cold china or the handcrafts disseminated all around. But more than 3 months of preproduction and preparation where dedicated to build in his mind, an entire cosmos to cover the 80 m2 of the gallery.
Prehistoric times and our present interact in a place without a real or possible existence. The ruins, the media, fantasy and reality, technology and handcrafts, life and death participate of a creative tension that nurture and neutralise each other at the same time.

Ruth Benzacar Gallery

http://www.ruthbenzacar.com/

Size matters?

2009-04-22T10:04:00.001-07:00

Natalia Kempowsky
Sculpture Magazine - May 2009

The importance of the exhibition Size matters?, lies in the original way the artist finds to approach issues related with migration, human behaviors, culture and social relationships. Because these are those kinds of problems artists that lived in different countries, always feel related to. Natalia Kempowsky was born in Colombia, her family has German roots, and she studied in London and participated in several solo and group exhibitions in Colombia, London and New York. Size matters? is clearly one of those cases where the personal story of the artist, the multicultural influences in her work is more than relevant.
Kempowsky is fascinated with human behavior and how the environment affects it. The political, religious, cultural, and social context where a person grows is obviously the main structure that gives shape to the identity and personality each person develops. The type of art an artist produces is also a way of expressing the way he/she acts and interacts socially and how the world is perceived. Natalia chooses specific locations and study people’s actions: she photographs them, draw them, and talk to them; pure interaction. But not only those experiences are important, also the architectonical structures, regular activities, the ecosystem, objects that surround us, time and space, “information that let me understand social phenomenon and patterns in social development”, she says.
The wooden spheres are the original part of her work in this exhibition. Usually she’s not bond to any material in particular, she uses all kinds of objects, installations, and public interventions. She always focus around the main ideas related with freedom to travel and explore, nationality, humans, the dynamics of international migration and immigration, cultural identity, the environment. The spheres represent the different countries of the American continent. The curator designed a special place where they should be located inside the gallery according to the design of a “virtual map” which also relates the size of the countries in each of the several globes, with the concept of freedom those countries have and how they use it within their territory. The real size, the surface of each country, therefore, is not the reference the artist uses to create the sculptures. The main materials are recycled woods. The empty semi spheres are bond together with metallic locks but pieces could be separated manually allowing the spectator to look inside of them where figures drawn as if they were engravings, represent the most characteristic features of each country.
Next to the biggest sphere – the U.S - Kempowsky places small paper “people” who embody the thousands of souls that once emigrated; by defect, they also refer to those hundreds of countries people left behind. They hang from a rope, some are falling, and others are just standing and many close or in small paper ships. Spheres just present the situation where not only the size of the territory is fundamental because of its richness in natural resources but because of its content in cultural diversity. The artist develops a new map of the world, as real as any geographical map could be, where boundaries are flexible and redefined as we speak; the more each country opens its limits, the richer it gets because of the immigrants.

Maria Elena Kravetz Art Gallery – Cordoba, Argentina – 2nd - 30th July, 2008
http://www.mariaelenakravetzgallery.com/index.htm

Claudia Gherstenfeld "AVANTI"

2009-04-02T11:04:00.000-07:00

Sculpture Magazine - March 2009
http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag09/mar_09/mar09.shtml

Claudia Gherstenfeld is an argentine young artist. She started painting, then she tried with ceramics, but her main concerns lately are related with sculptures and objects.

This exhibition, where she presents her new production, is called “AVANTI”. The entire presentation is related with humans. Shoes, clothes, everything we wear speak for ourselves even if we don’t want to. The artist works with shoes, objects and wheels and its relation with the motion of life; shoes represent the constant activity people have, the never ending circle of moving forward. The exhibition’s name, an Italian expression, expresses the idea of a turning wheel, just like the unpredictable wheel of fortune. “AVANTI” also gives us permission to walk, to pass, to enter; it’s a friendly way of welcoming others.

The idea of working with simple materials to give shape to those shoes that recreate so many different characters and individuals, is also related with the ordinary action of putting them on every day just to get started. Gherstenfeld wanted to show as many varieties of shoes as she could. The entire exhibition presents all types of alternatives for the spectator to easily find the correct option that suits with his/her personal story. Some sculptures look “tired”, other shoes look fancy and glamorous and some reveal the cruel or tender side of its owner; even the artist’s shoes are part of the exhibition, her real shoes left in one of the corners of the gallery the opening night of the show. And you can tell a lot of Gherstenfeld´s personality just by looking at those colorful high heels.

The support, the materials the artist used, basically paper, glue, and paint - but combined with flowers, nails, wood and real heels and spike heels - are transformed in such a way that the small sculptures look so natural we could even feel attracted to reach them and try them. And I also see there’s an interesting analogy between those pieces and the titles the artist gave them. Simplicity seems to be an ideal she wants to achieve, the main concern she seeks, but the paradox is also present because every title is configured in a cryptic way, far from being easily accessible: the title could represent just capital letters like R.I.P (not much more than an R, an I and a P) that communicate us nothing in case we don’t know the meaning of those letters all together just separated by dots; but it could also refer to the appearance of the shoe-sculpture. We could make the exercise of trying to find out the concept within those unpronounceable words, we could also choose to create the meaning ourselves, or we can just let it go and assume it is part of an intimate pact between the artist and her art work. An original way that Claudia Gherstenfeld finds to relate what an appearance could sell and how words give names those appearances; not always the same thing. As she said: “as simple and as complex as life itself”.

Claudia Aranovich

2009-01-01T14:16:00.000-08:00

Sculpture Magazine
http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag09/janfeb_09/janfeb09.shtml
January 2009

Claudia Aranovich’s work is a battlefield, a dialogical relationship of materials, message, artist, and spectator. The pieces presented here were made between 1993 and 2007, in a variety of styles and materials. Aranovich builds a bridge connecting the past and the present, recalling our story as a society and as individuals. Each work refers to the organic: seeds, branches, logs, honeycombs, and fur are just a few of her references. Everything seems to be alive, in these juxtapositions of resin, polyester, glass, iron, and steel. Aranovich encourages the materials to nurture each other, to mix and play together but, at the same time, to keep their own identities. She is concerned with the power within the materials, and she establishes a dialogue between organic and ideal or geometric forms. Some pieces, such as the “Flags,” are a cruel reminder of Argentina’s social crisis in 2001. Made of broken glass, the “Flags” represent the fragmentation felt by people in this country.

The “Relief Boxes” enclose natural materials such as honeycombs, juxtaposed with words such as “future,” “hope,” and “security.” Natural life seems trapped in artificial structures, in a delicate and unified balance that brings the entire piece into harmony. Aranovich also uses photographs printed on steel sheets or placed inside logs and combined with lights to balance artificial and natural elements.In Aranovich’s work, geometry establishes a balance or an ambiguity between irregular and ideal forms. In the “Spheres,” exteriors made of materials that suggest perfection, such as glass, split open to reveal branches or roots—pod forms, like the wooden Semilla 2, made of materials that are imperfect by nature no matter what form or shape they take. The same is true of Natural/Artificial, a tower shape made of lead, glass, and roots embedded in resin that tilts away from the vertical to suggest organic, rather than architectural, growth.Aranovich turns materials into vehicles for a story narrating the tensions between human beings and the surrounding world, both natural and social. The balance that she strikes between perfection and irregularity summarizes human ambiguities and conflicts. Materials evoke memories while suggesting the origin of life. In all of Aranovich’s works, we experience the transcendent essences through an absolutely artificial presence.

Leon Ferrari: "The Musicians"

2008-01-12T14:13:00.000-08:00

Sculpture MagazineDecember, 2008
http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag08/dec_08/dec08.shtml

Diversity is perhaps the best way to refer to Leon Ferrari’s art. The argentine artist left a profound legacy in the history of Latin-American art since he started in the 50´s. Diversity is expressed in the variety he chooses to produce his work: drawings, paintings, videos sculptures and installations among others. The variety is also present in the materials he uses as support: wires, plastics, wood, metals and glass; he works with paint, magazines, poetic quotes, animations and photocopies. Everything could become an art work in Leon Ferrari’s hands.“The Musicians” integrate a group of sculptures that the own artist defines as monstrous. The material that shapes the disfigured structures is polyurethane, which its particular characteristic is to create a hard crust when it’s solid in the exterior, acting as a second skin for the creature’s bodies. But in the interior, a complex net seems to catch the big holes of emptiness that represent the soul of those characters. Ferrari, going the opposite way of a fine Renaissance sculptor, instead of approaching the piece from the outside trying to find the sculpture “trapped” within, he works by addition.
Violence, physical and psychological, has always been a main concern in Ferrari’s work. “The Musicians” relate with the constant presence of tragedy, war, desolation; their appearance, those mutilated and deformed figures, relate with some sort of cruelty such as the massacres of the past and present century or the collateral effects of that violence that impacts on humanity. All the tension, the exuberance and the ugliness are represented in those bodies in ebullition; the polyurethane freezes de exact moment when the bubbles, such as magma, erupt from its continent. And all that chaos finds its foundation in a perfect, solid, inner order that lies beneath.This work is as committed as the ones he did decades ago denouncing the Vietnam War atrocities or the participation of the Catholic Church in crimes that attempted against the human rights. Here, Ferrari makes us face the cruel reality around us no matter in which part of the globe we are. Not only the “musicians and fancy ladies” are the main attraction, but the music that the artist specially selected to create the atmosphere that welcomes the audience – spectators. “The Musicians”, holding their instruments tight, create a mystic circle that integrates people walking by. They could look alike at first sight, but they are not. They are different from us and different between them; each one is an individual locked up in its own loneliness, a feeling those who live in the big metropolis could experience by being fully integrated but lonely at the same time. Where anything “different”, anything “freak” becomes attractive, scary and threatening all together. Ferrari picked Miles Davis’s music, the kind of music where breaking the tradition is the main idea, where there’s no comfortable place for the musicians or the audience to rely on and improvisation and melodic experimentation are the tools that inspire creation. While Miles Davis broke every rule of a “politically correct” music composer, Leon Ferrari works in the same direction: always trying to generate tense situations, searching for the awkward feeling and pushing us to reach deep introspection. Those creatures of an average man’s size, observe and invite us to be part of their show; from their “comfy” chairs and ready to start playing, as we get closer we realize they are not so lovely and colorful, they are not so comfortable either and we easily recognize the terrifying presence that reality that made monsters out of them; monsters playing an irritating symphony. Nevertheless, there’s still a certain resemblance with ourselves; we could identify that we also belong to that same unmerciful reality and that we could all, eventually, became its victim.In October 2007, Leon Ferrari won the 52° Edition of the International Art Biennale of Venice.

Rob Verf

2008-01-10T14:14:00.000-08:00

Rob Verf - Braga Menéndez Gallery
October, 2008
http://www.sculpture.org/documents/sm-arch.shtml

Rob Verf was born in The Netherlands, a country that is famous for its artists. After moving to Argentina, his works continued to be exhibited in museums and galleries throughout Europe and the U.S.The work in his recent work captures his perspective on life and sexuality, not as an erotic construction of reality but as a strong presence that influences us all: the constant contradiction, the seduction of opposites and the complementary, a balance between body and mind, the essence and the superfluous, the inner energy and the visible exterior. Verf tries to create a complete model and in order to do so, he turns himself into a complete artist: he’s a painter that also makes sculptures, constructions, drawings, photographs, and collages. Painting and photography allow him to find the way to present in another format the torsos he constantly manipulates in his sculpture: they become the protagonists in his overall narrative. Verf’s fascination with those torsos is almost obsessive, he approaches them again and again from various points of view, as if reaching for an inner essence that is ultimately unreachable.Verf says, “When I make a sculpture-construction such as Woman in a mirror reflection, I do not only want to express the pose the woman is making, but also the energy that makes the pose. I want to use the total confrontation of the woman in front of the mirror: the interesting part in this sculpture-construction is the fact of it’s dualism between a two dimensional space (the mirror) and a three dimensional space (the figure). The painter’s and the sculptor’s vision go hand in hand.Geometry is important in his work because its presence organizes that volatile space where the sculptures seem to be suspended in the air or reflected in the mirror. He uses telgopor, plastic, papers, magazines, drawings, and paint to create thse mobile objects floating in an imaginary sky inside the gallery.To understand the coherence of Verf’s world, we must become a part of it: we have to participate in the illusion, play the game, share the irony. Verf combines his feelings, his doubts, his fascinations, his obsessions to show that the visual is always hiding something that lies beneath, something much more powerful than any representation of the outside world could provide. Verf is critical and invites us to assume a critical point of view. What we see may be the pure energy within the objects, or perhaps the contradictions that demonstrate that ambiguity is inevitable and we should look to both sides of the mirror to get whole picture, the complete moment.

Andres Sobrino

2008-01-04T14:07:00.000-08:00

Courtesy Sculpture Magazine - April 2008
http://www.sculpture.org/

The Contemporary Art Gallery, Braga Menéndez, recently gave us the chance to get involved with Andres Sobrino´s designs; a young talented argentine artist that studied architecture, graphic design and communication.The installation might look like a retrospective where he presents pieces such as “Heaven and Hell”, 2001 (while hell is a black square based in a formula discovered by the English mathematic T.H.Willcocks, where 24 perfect squares could integrate to become one, heaven, even if forms were calculated according to the aura section, never reach perfection); “Diffuse Photographs”, 2002 (the idea is to keep the image out of focus so as to capture the light objects reflect); “Assimilation of the Circle”, 2004 (interesting proposal that demonstrates that square figures could turn into a perfect circle); “Crosses”, 2004-2005 and “Diagonals”, 2006-2007 (the artist breaks the rigid organizations with black and white diagonals that “cancel” or “deny” the function of those formal structures). And finally text, “Junk mail”(also playing an important role by defining what formalism and concrete art is about in Ad Reinhardt´s words).Andres Sobrino exhibits almost a decade of hard work developing autonomist ideas, now interacting while sharing the same space and trying to make some room for each message to be expressed, and avoiding the almost common tendency where the most pregnant designs capture our attention and subsumes all the rest in the shadows. Something is obvious when we look around the installation: Sobrino knows very well what contemporary art talks about. His inspiration is back in the late 20th century, assimilating techniques as well as the working philosophy of conceptual artists such as Blinky Palermo or Imi Knöebel. But conceptualism and concrete art isn’t something easy to understand or even like. Abstraction demands us to swim inside the artist’s mind and try to match our feelings with the ones the artist is communicating through his work. But also, abstraction makes us search in our own mind because we could choose just to consume the powerful geometrical figures painted with dramatic contrasts, or we could defy ourselves to dive deeper and find out what really happens to us in front of some of those colorful matrixes. The artist uses common industrial materials to create his works: paint, synthetic enamels, varnishes and transparent lacquers, epoxy, wood, zinc, aluminum, vinyl, different sort of plaques, multi laminates. Excellent combination to relate the spectator with his art. Sobrino feels comfortable with those simple materials rather than using the traditional ones; and there lies the paradox: casual material used to express sophisticated messages that demand our compromise to be able to capture the essence. Simple things lead us through complexity.He said: “It is hard to talk about my work, but I guess I’m close to conceptual art, formalism, concrete art, abstraction and color (…) Design helped me to find my road.”. It certainly did. Andres Sobrino has such a wonderful sensitivity that could balance concepts with pragmatism; he could create an environment where geometry seems to repeat patterns but when we look close, each design refers to a different story. Sobrino combines every possible conceptual influence with the gestalt theories that bonds our most primitive perception structures with the geometrical universe he creates. And we feel secure somehow, even while facing that mysterious world, we feel free and contained in those forms.

A conversation with Karina Peisajovich

2007-01-12T13:59:00.000-08:00

Sculpture Magazine - December 2007
http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag07/dec_07/dec07.shtml

Karina Peisajovich was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1966. Her approach to art theory and practice begins by studying at the National School of Fine Arts Prilidiano Pueyrredón between 1984 and 1988. Three trips would be crucial in her career: the first one at the beginning of the 90´s when she visited the United States and Europe, where she gets in contact with the matrix of every inspiration that seemed to be so far away and distant. In 1995 she participates in the Kuitca Scholarship and in 1998 she starts working with the light works. One year later, she makes a second trip back to the US where she participates in a residence for international artists, ART OMI. In 2001 she receives an award from the National Fund of Arts and Fulbright Commission, to participate in a new residence in New York, the ISCP (International Residency and Curatorial Program). This third trip made her stay in the Big Apple for a year and a half, taking advantage of the international scenario that was opening its gates right in front of her eyes. She returned to Buenos Aires in January 2003, where she actually lives and works.
Peisajovich is open to spontaneous, ephemeral and even hazardous situations, as well as the constant fluctuation between what is real and what an abstraction. She creates environments that compromise and transport us to fantastic sites with an enchanting aura embracing the entire work of the artist. Karina invites us to imagine those invented worlds, where fabulous chromatic dialogues welcome the spectator to an experience developed here and now; an experience that disappears as soon as the light illuminates the salon. The materiality of the work, remains unseen in the darkened gallery. These amazing scenarios that our minds away, if only for a few moments, from a reality that sometimes seems unbearable, encouriging us to exercise our ability to dream. Peisajpvich solo shows include "Fade" at Galeria Braga Menendez in Buenos Aires and "Paisaje Doméstico" at Casa de America in Madrid. She also participated in numerous group shows, inluding the Lodz Biennal and the exhibition "Surface Charge" at the Anderson Gallery, at Virginia Commenwealth University in Richmond.MCB: How did you get involved in the art world?KP: To become an artist wasn’t something I planned. Since I was a little girl, I always participated in activities related to art: I took piano lessons and dance classes, and somehow, I think, it developed naturally.MCB: Do you feel art chose you or was it the other way around? Is there a story behind this choice?KP: My profile as an artist took many different roads that influenced one another as time went by. Sometimes the influence came from unexpected situations such as studying battery, taking classes with an electrician or participating in a seminar of the history of rock and roll. I have this constant feeling that something that begins as simple curiosity, conspires to finally turn into a work of art. The years I studied at the National School of Fine Arts were those first fragile years when democracy was recovered in Argentina. During that time, I got deeply involved in the underground scenario which was one of the most interesting cultural things happening in the city. In 1992 I went back to my painting, but it isn’t until the end of the 90´s when I started making my first experiences with lights.MCB: How would you define yourself: as a plastic artist, a painter, a sculptor?KP: I prefer to define myself as a visual artist. I guess that definition allows me to think about my work freely.MCB: What role does sculpture play in your production?KP: I think about sculpture as the irruption of space in a certain material, and vice versa. If sculpture is associated with objects, it’s hard for me not to feel this definition far from my work. My installations use space as a “form” and this space create a new body with a volume of its own. Sometimes I even design specific sites for each work.
MCB: What do you think that the third dimension allows you to express that you wouldn’t be able to represent in any other plastic way?KP: It allows me to manipulate the space and real time. The third dimension expressed in two dimensions, is still a selection, a window that traps the images of the world in time and space. When I started working directly in the space, I realized I could express other ideas that were impossible to imagine in two dimensions. When I transfer my paintings from the canvas to the wall and then to the architectonic scenarios, I decide to make a turn in my work, based on the tensions that relate the representation with its own possibilities. The work of art emerges from the intersection of the architectonic space and the space of the representation. The work of art becomes what it really is.On the other hand, working with real space allows me to include the spectator in the project. The spectator becomes the theme and substance. For example, when I’m working in the design of an installation, I imagine the spectator’s eyes and the possible moves within that space. I make sketches, drawings and scale models, always keeping in mind all those possible movements. Space invades the perception field, which is larger than the visual field.We want to highlight that space, no longer bi-dimensional, and which compromises the spectator. Regarding the light works, so typical in your production, what are they telling us?When I create an installation, I use the space as a battle field where all the elements I used to use in my paintings, interact. The difference is that in the installation, I start working in the dark. Darkness as a state of light and shadow as a level of obscurity. Obscurity attacks the light and volume emerges, but that volume doesn’t really exist. Light becomes a brush stroke that spots the wall. The wall looses its definition because of the shadow. Real space starts looking like something else. The eye gets anxious. These unstable situations are part of the mechanism of the work of art. My work takes place in time, using special devises that activate and graduate sequences that determine when lights go in or out. The work of art mutates making the images and time become one.My works, sometimes conceived for specific architectonic spaces, inherit the space of the Renaissance, but they don’t contemplate an audience located in a safety and commensurable place. On the contrary, I invent situations in the space held by geometrical forces that try to alter and dissolve the main constructive lines in the room. In some way, I feel like an artist of the beginning of the XX century.

Alejandra Tavolini-Damien Hirst

2007-01-09T14:05:00.000-08:00

About the Study of the Protagonists

SCULPTURE MAGAZINEhttp://www.sculpture.org/documents/sm-arch.shtml

September, 2007

If there is an artist that turned into a paradigmatic character in the contemporary art world, that would be Damien Hirst. During the 90´s, he presented the series Natural History, where real dead animals were placed in big crystal containers; animals such as a shark in The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of the Living (1991), a sheep in Away from the Flock (1994), a cow with its calf in Mother and Child Divided and a pig in This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed at home (1996).Back in 2007 and thousands of miles away from England, the argentine artist Alejandra Tavolini, emulated Hirst´s work by recreating Natural History but using puppets instead of dead animals. She reduced the scale almost to its minimum and placed in small crystal urns, also filled with formol, all types of puppets as vivid reproductions of those cows, pigs, sharks, sheeps used by the British master.About the Study of the Protagonists has an antecedent: the series Fauna developed since 2004, where puppets were created based on a conscious investigation of the real animal’s anatomy. The artist established different stages to define the entire process: The first stage was focused in the elaboration. The puppets were totally black and the main features were just suggested. The special distribution of the padding, gave the animals a certain look of weakness and lack of vitality. In addition, they were treated with cutting elements, violently slashed and also crashed into the ground while the process of assemblage was taking place. The artist tormented those puppets as the real creatures were tormented by all kind of disgraces in their natural life. In a second stage, another group of puppets suffered new physiognomic changes: their bodies mutated, heads multiplied and extremities were modified as if they were under the effects of “genetic diseases”.About the Study of the Protagonists turned puppets into “scientific objects” from the very moment they were immersed into formol and exposed to the scrupulous sight to judge them. But there isn’t just a scientific interest in this investigation; it is also an invitation to meditate about the artist situation in the contemporary world. Tavolini and Hirst represent both sides of the same coin. Tavolini created the exact same animals Hirst used, but not as fake versions but as examples that highlight the differences between two realities shown not only in the quality of the materials involved, the scales or complexity of the plastic elements used in those pieces. The main contrast lays in the relation between the working conditions and commercial circulation and approach to both works; the eternal conflict of the “first and third world production”. Publicity, location, access and reception of art by the public in general, but from the critics and art dealers in particular whose valuation is aesthetical as well as economical, and decisive to turn them, or not, into wonders.

Germina Campos, Espacio Nómade de Gestión Cultural, Santa Fé- Argentina, March 2007.
http://www.germinacampos.com.ar/

David Lamelas-Time as Activity

2007-01-04T12:35:00.000-08:00

David Lamelas MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires)

Buenos Aires,Argentina

http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag07/april_07/april07.shtml

April 2007

Recent visitors to MALBA were surprised at the museum’s entrance by an enormous sculpture made by the Argentine artist David Lamelas. Best known for his work in film and video and his conceptualist sculpture of the ’60s and ’70s, Lamelas was born in Buenos Aires in 1946 and studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts. In 1968, he went to London on a scholarship and studied at St. Martin’s School of Arts. In 1976 he moved to Los Angeles, and by 1988 he had settled in New York. All through the ’90s he lived in New York, Brussels, and Berlin, and since 1999 he has spent his time in Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, and Paris. Lamelas’s participation in individual and group exhibitions in the most important art capitals of the world, as well as several retrospectives, proves him to be one of the most interesting messengers of contemporary art; this could be clearly seen in his piece placed at MALBA’s gates.Responding to the security issues that plague not only Buenos Aires, but every big city, Lamelas gave a statement of sculptural proportions: a “surveillance mirror” that reflected and acted as a guardian, controlling everything that happened around the museum. Unlike Kapoor’s Sky Mirror at Rockefeller Center, which brought the sky down to the ground, Lamelas’s Time As Activity (Buenos Aires) concentrated on surrounding action. Four meters in diameter, this sculpture made of polyester resin with fiberglass, rigid stainless steel rods, and mirror sheeting became the most recent manifestation of Lamelas’s life-long endeavor to relate time, as the vehicle for action, to urban and architecture structures. Always demanding an active public, Lamelas’s work emphasizes the importance of ideas and concepts. When he was invited by the museum to produce a piece, he thought that placing a camera to capture reality wasn’t as good an idea as trying to capture movement itself. He couldn’t have made a better choice to summarize the aims of his trilogy “Time as Activity,” begun in 1969, in which he filmed different European cities (starting with Düsseldorf) in random daily situations, always seeking the work of art not as an object but in relation to surrounding space.Urban life was the soul of his mirror, which transformed “Time as Activity” into magnificent proportions. It wasn’t a traditional sculpture. According to the artist, “it didn’t glorify anyone or commemorate anything, it was pure present, an anti-monument.” The kind of spectator that Lamelas always assumes was once again part of his scenario; viewers found themselves inside the mirror while walking toward the entrance, suddenly stopped by a “big eye” that made evident not only the sometimes cruel and awful reality surrounding us, but us as well. Because, whether we like it or not, we are part of it. María Carolina Baulo

Terryfying

2007-01-03T12:29:00.000-08:00

NORBERTO GÓMEZ – ALBERTO HEREDIA – PABLO SUAREZ: TERRIFYING

http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag07/mar_07/mar07.shtml

March 2007

Few experiences can be reduced to only one word. Anyone that saw the exhibition that MAMAN Gallery dared to present in Buenos Aires, would understand what I’m talking about. The Gallery proposed a trilogy of artists that even if their own style was pretty different along their careers, the three of them were gathered together to aim at the same target, defying any primitive interpretation related to the concepts of like or dislike. Standing in front of Gómez, Heredia or Suárez works, it’s hard to think..Terrifying; that’s the word that defines the feeling someone could have when walking through the gallery and suddenly found lost in the middle of bodies with no flesh turned into pathetic shadows of what they once were; beheaded puppets wrapped with bands and tapes, allowing to capture their figures but not their personalities already corrupted as that body that needs to be contained by those bands so as not to fall into pieces; bones that embody the messengers of death; rats representing people degraded to infrahuman levels; and the list goes on. Who is able to have an aesthetic thought when those works cry out loud for us to take all that rejection we feel at first and turn it into courage to face them and see?. The artists tried to tells us something beyond any superficial analysis; their work compromise every fiber of our identity as argentines and citizens of a world full filled with mental and physical corruption. They were committed with an ethic and social reality that overflows us all; a reality that speaks about the darkness during the 70s and 80s were the military regime left behind thousands of bodies ripped apart, a scared society captured by panic and silence and participating in each corner of an appropriation of its personality. Freedom was suppressed in every possible way: freedom to act, to speak, to be, and as a result the individuals lost their unique condition as humans and started to look alike the rest, seeking by any means to achieve their goals in a battle field that looks just as a the ones used by the roman gladiators.Gomez´s frightening skeletons, are snapshots of the remains of those bodies held in the prison of disgrace, torture, oppression and violence carried out by the state terrorism. Skeletons that are no longer people but represent, as an hologram, the sequels of a past that is still so alive that only by seeing them, they evoke our deepest remembrances full of anguish.When Heredia silenced his models by cutting off their heads or wrapping their bodies to “hold” all the erosion harassing them, it would be like trying to take the “perfect picture” posing to capture the eternity; a false vision that behind the make up hides the evidence of time that reaches us all even if we try to deny it.And when we thought we had enough, when we realized that the body itself is the center of attention, focus for cruelty and punishment we sometimes are responsible for, our main tool of integration and interaction of passions that we manipulate and let other do as well, using it as a hostage and sometimes as a temple, the body appears once more in Suarez´s work. Characters gesturing desperately, emphatic sarcasm and irony, people turned into fealty animals capable of selling themselves to the best offer. Or meaby, a simple poor christian that can no longer carry the burden of his cross because it has the enormous proportions of the disgraces that our society makes us live. Even yet, we don’t know if they are laughing or crying, creating a satiric situation while facing the tragic.Since their first productions and particularly since the 60s, the three of them occupied a relevant position where they always approached an attitude of compromise, challenge and denunciation, filling their ideas with volume and turning them into sculptures that narrated the suffocating reality surrounding them. I don’t want to think they represented only despair. Even when hope is hidden in the darkest place where inspiration is found, even if it is very well hidden, it must be there. Because an artist needs hope to be able to think about a future, no matter how hard the present is; a future that takes “in the raw”, responsibility for its tragic present and compromises not to leave behind, never more, images so terrifying to be remembered.MAMAN Gallery, Av. Libertador 2475, Buenos Aires, August 2006Maria Carolina Baulo