When the Catholic religion landed in Latin America, it was embraced
with a fervor and imagination that mingled native and African mythologies.
Each of the three artists explores the taboos that inevitably accompany
the holy, the worship of icons, and the radicalization or iconoclasm
that occurs when icons are subverted by maverick sensibilities.
Luckily the religion of Modernism can withstand the occasional
desecration, and some of its effects can be witnessed here.
The grid has haunted artists for decades. It is a sublime, pure
form, a kind of holy ghost, and Eugenio Espinoza, originally from
Venezuela but now residing in Miami, has mined its potential since
the 1970s. His sketchbook pages from that era confer a humble persona
on the formidable grid. Espinoza acknowledges the rigor of Euclid
and the inspiration of Descartes, but renders the grid oddly humorous,
almost cuddly and familiar, like a quilt. In one case, he depicts
the grid as a costume for a dog, in another it is a hammock.
These
early works, and a series of Polaroids that document companions
of the artist interacting with grid paintings, inject the dry investigation
of pure form with a humanist presence. In a rebuttal to a 1972
work of his own titled El Impenetrable (The Impenetrable), in which
access to the gallery space was restricted by a grid, Espinoza
has installed here Negativa Moderna, where the grid, marked on
strips of fabric lying on CIFO’s floor, is sullied by the
footsteps of visitors. His geometric, freestanding pieces lean
against the wall, courting the unbalanced, the off-kilter, and
flirting with other impurities that distract from the regularity
of the painted canvas grid. Inserting such tender props as a teddy
bear figurine, a glass jar with herbs, and car jacks, the offhand
treatment of the sacrosanct minimalist grid is radical. The assault
on the grid is nothing less than avant-garde, a military term appropriately
applied.
Alvaro Oyarzún, from Chile, cheekily insists that the scattershot
installation of hundreds of pen-and-ink cartoons, mini-canvases
of fleshy lumps, cross sections of landscape, abstract studies,
didactic illustrations, and fragments of snapshots is a painting.
Unified by the title The Painted Image or the Most Beautiful Memories
of the Life of Captain Carrot, this work is an exhaustive taxonomy
of forms and flitting thoughts related to the epistemology of the
artist. A small figure fashioned out of a carrot stands in for
the artist performing his ritual activities — visiting museums,
working in the studio.
Oyarzún’s intense grapho-mania
rules his vision here, and while he might defend the lack of integration
in this piece as being precisely the point, it does suffer from
too much vacillation, a lack of commitment. Here the inherent radicalism
of the artist’s approach — deconstructing the painting
as a single contiguous picture plane into myriad miniscule fragments — is
interesting as a time-based phenomenon. The application of many
thoughts is required by the viewer to decode and then knit into
a whole each pictorial episode. Perhaps that amount of effort is
equal to the experience of thoughts passing through the psyche
of the artist as he creates the work. Perhaps, but the economics
of this work are not very efficient, even though it contains moments
of delight.
The most compelling work on view is by Colombian artist José Alejandro
Restrepo. A magician of the moving image, Restrepo has a firm grasp
of the technical aspects of video and film, inventing new forms
and breathing new life into religious imagery that could so easily
be merely cliché. The new video work commissioned by CIFO
is titled Protomartires, illustrating the santoral, a calendar
of the lives of the saints, each frame drenched in glistening black
and white. His presentation of familiar religious iconography is
made poetic by virtue of the insertion of precise contemporary
details.
A petite nun grasps a bullhorn, opens her mouth, and wails,
her cry synchronized with the piercing sound of an air-raid siren.
A vaguely leprous-looking man stands in his underwear, wearing
a lucha libre mask, and he scratches his skin at a slightly speeded-up
rate, looking as much like an alien as a saint. A man covers himself
with a blanket printed with the head of a lion, and the accompanying
soundtrack roars. The head of St. John the Baptist is dismembered
by a video monitor on a silver platter.
The camera remains fixed through much of this work, each figure
framed against a simple wall in an alley, the message being that
the monotony of everyday life is unbearable and requires extreme
acts of self-mortification to evoke feeling. This martyrdom is
a radical act, a gesture by an individual that unravels the rigid,
prescripted social order (remember the grid?), and by doing so
distinguishes itself and achieves importance and power. The unfashionable,
the poignant, the tattered, the imperfect, the abject — Restrepo
locates the sensuality of this imagery but handles it with restraint.
Counter to the prevailing North American aesthetic, which concerns
itself with the satisfaction of pleasure, the fulfillment of desire,
a kind of ethics-free hedonism, these works elevate discomfort
and pain, vulnerability and sacrifice. Restrepo’s sculptural
pieces are inspired by ex-votos, the cheap metal trinkets depicting
body parts that are left by the faithful in churches to petition
the saints for a favorable intervention. Restrepo’s life-size
feet and hands are pierced with tiny video stigmata, no bigger
than eyeballs, the moving images like mini light bulbs broadcasting
obscure but real acts of martyrdom.
There is no doubt that Ella Fontanals Cisneros has transformed
the cultural landscape of Miami thus far, and that she will continue
to do so as she marries off her own Miami Art Central to the Miami
Art Museum, forming MAC@MAM. Through exhibitions like 3 Perspectives,
she skips Miami ahead on the board game of establishing itself
as an arts capital with a special mission: to facilitate the dissemination
of Latin American voices in the international cultural conversation.
CIFO is located at 1018 N. Miami Ave., not far from the Carnival
Center for the Performing Arts. The exhibition is open to the public
Thursday through Sunday from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. through May
6. CIFO will also open in conjunction with the next Wynwood Second
Saturday event on April 14. Call CIFO at 305-455-3380 for more
information or visit www.cifo.org.
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