Lowe Art Museum,
Jan 30, 2003 - Apr 06, 2003
Coral Gables , Florida , USA
PARADISE LOST? Aspects of Landscapes in Latin American art
by means of Press Release
Later in the 20th century, traditional concepts of landscape painting give way to contemporary ones, as objective idioms are replaced by subjective idioms. The influence of post-war abstraction is well represented in the exhibition by Chileans Roberto Matta and Alejandro Obregón, Nemesio Antunez from Colombia, Mexican artist Gunther Gerzso and Armando Morales, from Nicaragua, all of whom pursue an individualized visual vocabulary of abstract idioms. While Panamanian painter Guillermo Trujillo, whose painting, Manes del acantilado (Cliff Spirits) appears on the cover of the exhibition catalogue, pursues an idiosyncratic figurative style based on nucho divination sticks of the indigenous culture the San Blaas islands.
For contemporary artists, nature has more often than not served as a symbol and metaphor for a variety of complex situations never far removed from politics, ecology, or humanism. The relationship of land to landfill is the ironic focus of Tanbos by Cuban-born, Miami painter Tomás Sánchez, who is better known for his beautiful, surrealistic landscapes, one of which is also on view at the Lowe. Brazilian painter Antonio Henrique Amaral’s One of Them employs imagery that describes the destruction of the Amazon. In a painting by César Menéndez (El Salvador), Camino a Guazapa, from 1990, military helicopters loom above a fiery Central American landscape, while a 1998 photograph by Mexican artist Laura Anderson Barbata, In the Order of Chaos, captures indigenous peoples as they flee the terrifying presence of a hovering chopper.
Artists also employ a hybrid and non-traditional artistic language that completely transforms the relationship between medium and motif. Puerto Rican artist, Rigoberto Quintana, suggests landscapes of the mind on the painted surface of sculpted ceramic heads; an interactive installation by Argentine photographer Sergio Vega, Back to Backyardeden Express (1995-97), features a stuffed Florida çgator riding miniature train rails across a real dirt landscape; Miamian Glexis Novoa, utilizes graphite on travertine, for a site-specific piece at the Lowe; Venezuelan-born Natalia Benedetti, draws viewers into a topographical/aerial realm through the medium of video in Don’t Wake Me (2000); and Puerto Rican artist Rosa Irigoyen employs paper towel dispensers, Saca y bota (Pull out and Throw away) 1 to 10, from 2001.
|
