Tuesday 30 March 2010

'ULTRAPUÑETA' AN EXHIBITION OF ARTISTS FROM PUERTO RICO AT PROYECTOS ULTRAVIOLETA IN GUATEMALA


wall painting made with stabbed spray cans by Radames Juni Figueroa


Radames Juni Figueroa, 'Paraiso' garden


Radames Juni Figueroa, Melon+Zarzamoras+Aguardiente Guatemalteco=Fountain


Carolina Caycedo, 'Trust Each Other', hanging banner


Alana Iturralde, porcelain hand knuckles


Jesus Bubu Negron, Autoportraits in Times of Crisis


Raina Mast, palm tree paintings, from the series 'To fold or to break'


Fernando Pintado, 'Good Things Happen to Those Who Wait', rainbow paintings


Chemi Rosado, 'History over wheels'


Michael Linares, 'Toast for the absence of the object'


opening view


old cinema where Ultravioleta has it's exhibition space


JC passing by

Proyectos Ultravioleta presents
Ultrapuñeta
an exhibition with works by
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
Tony Cruz
Carolina Caycedo
Michael Linares
Chemi Rosado
Jesús "Bubu" Negrón
Alana Iturralde
Fernando Pintado
Raina Mast
Javier Bosques
Marxz Rosado
Chaveli Sifre
Radamés "Juni" Figueroa
Joel "Yoyo" Rodriguez

Special Thanks To:
Beta-Local
Black and White Gallery, NY
The Estate of Mr. and Mrs. Wigmore
Pablo León de la Barra
Centro Cultural de España en Guatemala
El Corillo de Puerto Rico

ULTRAPUÑETA
March 19 - April 11 2010
Proyectos Ultravioleta
11 Calle 5-36 B, Zona 1
entre el Lux y la torre de parqueos
Guatemala 01001

info@proyectosultravioleta.com
http://www.proyectosultravioleta.com

Monday 29 March 2010

'SPRING RAPE' AT THE OPENING OF PRETEEN MEXICO


entrance to Preteen's new headquarters in Alameda neighbourhood in Mexico City


work by Dylan Reece (acapulco marihuana gold)


mask by Abdul Vas


spring smile by Anne de Vries


newspapers covered by Chemi Rosado


'Marihuana Sculpture' by Radames Juni Figueroa


Mr. Preteen Gerardo Contreras (aka Brokeback Hermosillo) next to work by Anne de Vries


Paco Berna and Elias Redstone


Big Seb and Xavier Laboulbenne


Lady Gaga/Little Boots and PP


young artist pissing in the kitchen while waiting to be spring raped.


SPRING RAPE
PRETEEN GALLERY OPENS IN MEXICO CITY
MARCH 27, 2010. 9 PM - 1:00 AM
ERNESTO PUGIBET 47, CENTRO ALAMEDA, MEXICO CITY

CURATED BY REST IN PEACE FARRAH FAWCETT (RIPFF)

PRETEEN IS PLEASED TO PRESENT SPRING RAPE, A NEW GROUP EXHIBITION FEATURING THE
WORKS OF

KARI ALTMANN
ANIMAL CHARM
ABDUL VAS
BRAD TINMOUTH
RADAMÉS FIGUEROA "JUNI"
ANNE DE VRIES
PETER SUTHERLAND
DYLAN REECE
DANIEL HIPÓLITO
LUCAS SOI

"SPRING RAPE" IS BOTH A CELEBRATION AND AN EXPLORATION ON THE THEME OF SPRING, WITH ITS PARTICULAR POWER TO TRANSFORM NATURAL PHENOMENA SUCH AS THE COLOR PALETTE CHANGES IT FORCES UPON VISUAL REALITY AS WELL AS ITS FASCINATING POWER TO STIMULATE AND IMPROVE PENILE ACTIVITY.

http://preteengallery.net/

Sunday 28 March 2010

MEETING NAUFUS RAMIREZ FIGUEROA AT 'CANTINA TIO PEPE' IN MEXICO CITY'S CENTRE


Naufus Ramirez Figueroa



cantina Tio Pepe


tattoo on Naufus' arm of his uncle, guerrilla combatant killed publicly during the civil war in Guatemala, and which prompted the exile of his family to Canada as political refugees when Naufus was seven.


Yesterday, I finally met for the first time, Guatemalan/Canadian performance artist Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa, who has recently relocated to Mexico City from Vancouver. I knew of his practice from 2004, when i was introduced to it by Costa Rican artist Federico Herrero (who told me about a performance Naufus had made where he played sexually with a carrot while listening to his father sing Mariachi music), and in 2007 I recommended him to AA Bronson for his exhibition 'School for Young Shamans' in NY.

Yesterday we met to discuss his participation in the exhibition I'm curating next month in Guatemala 'Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, Yucatan and elsewhere', which is loosely based on the travels in the area of Stephens and Catherwood in 1841 and of Robert Smithson in 1969.

We had some Victoria beers at cantina Tio Pepe in the corner of Dolores and Independencia (Pain and Independence!) in Mexico City's Alameda neighbourhood in the city's centre. Tio Pepe remains one of my favourite cantina's in the centre, and which happily hasn't disappeared or been renovated, like many other traditional cantina's which are not there anymore.

You can see more of Naufus work in his website http://www.naufus.com/

Saturday 27 March 2010

A VISIT TO MUAC (MUSEO UNIVERSITARIO DE ARTE CONTEMPORANEO) IN MEXICO CITY





A Felix Gonzalez Torres retrospective (very poetical, not very political or very sexual)


A Dan Graham mini pavilion/sculpture


a Gabriel Orozco hanging broom and hanging stuff from 2003


a sculpture from around 2002 by Thomas Glassford (an interesting artist quite unrecognized outside of Mexico)


Pablo Vargas Lugo's marble dust and pigments mandala, 2007 (another interesting artist unrecognized outside of Mexico and Peru, where he now lives)


Erick Beltran's printworks, from 2004


Mario Garcia Torres, 'Notes on the beginning of the end of video art', 2008, on artists apparitions on TV


Miguel Calderon's, 'Resistol 5000', 2003, self sustained can of sniffing glue


an early Stefan Bruggemann (Thoughts are Products and No Programme), 2002


and my favourite piece in the exhibition, Melanie Smith's 'Green Lush (Subtropicana Jungle Mix I)', from 1999


artist Melanie Smith, MUAC curator Patricia Sloane and film director Agnes Varda

I finally made it to the MUAC, the new museum of contemporary art in the National University of Mexico City which opened a bit more than a year ago. I won't comment much on the architecture, but it's quite disappointing that the building had to be designed by Teodoro Gonzalez de Leon and not by an architect of a younger generation. Born in 1926, Mr de Leon, who worked for Le Corbusier in 1947, has been the grand, official, monumental, and national architect of Mexico for at least the last four decades. He also designed the fantastic and brutalist Rufino Tamayo Museum in an abstract aztec modernist style in 1981.

With an eclectic collection of national and international art, many of it in loan from private collections (including the amazing Charpenel collection), what is interesting of MUAC is that there's finally in Mexico City a place which is not a private collection or a commercial gallery where it's possible to see contemporary art produced in Mexico since 1957 on a permanent basis. It has also hosted important exhibitions including Cildo Mireles retrospective (which was also seen at MACBA and Tate). The 'independence' of the museum, because of it being part of the University, might also become an alternative to Mexico City's other museums which are financed directly by the government's Ministry of Culture. It also has a great curatorial team, which includes Guillermo Santamarina and Patricia Sloane (pioneers of contemporary art curating in Mexico). Olivier Debroise was also part of the team, but he sadly died almost two years ago. Beyond any criticism, what might be interesting of MUAC, as french curator Corinne Diserens told me of her visit to the museum last November, is that the Museum feels alive, and this thanks to the big number of curious visitors wanting to experience the experience of contemporary art.

visit Muac's complicated to navigate website:
http://www.muac.unam.mx

Thursday 25 March 2010

JAIME GILI, PUBLIC INTERVENTION IN A NEIGHBOURHOOD IN CARACAS, VENEZUELA







Public art work finally completed in Caracas after many invitations and proposals. A work that relates to the organic architecture of parts of Caracas and with the community that builds and inhabits it. José Félix Ribas, Palo Verde, 2010

27 metallic pieces, each measuring abour 2.5 m wide. all placed around the new park. The park is part of the program of parks been undertaken by the local administration.

With thanks to (so far) : Jesús Fuenmayor, Mariana Jiménez, Sonia Pérez Story, Daniel Belandria, Benjamín, César, Junior, Enrique Bolívar, Josué, y los habitantes del Barrio José Félix Ribas.

http://www.jaimegili.org

ARMANDO ANDRADE AT MACBA, BARCELONA













Armando Andrade Tudela
ahir, demà
10 March – 6 June 2010
Curator: Chus Martínez

This exhibition heralds a new approach to considering the production of work in the setting of the Capella MACBA. All the exhibitions will share the common denominator of having been specifically produced to be shown in this space. The work produced by Armando Andrade Tudela, Peruvian artist living between Berlin and Saint-Étienne (France), includes two 16-mm films (transferred onto DVD) recently made and a wall piece Untitled (Two frames #2) (2010), all framed by an architecture also designed by the artist for the occasion.

The core of Andrade Tudela's project is a film that takes as its starting point the Synanon Foundation, set up in 1958 in Santa Monica, California, by Charles E. Dederich, whose intention was to build a community based on self-help and a vision of life as a constant exercise of rehabilitation. By the mid-1990s, Synanon had virtually disappeared without trace, aside from a few social activities that included its second-hand furniture stores.

The film features one such store where furniture and other artefacts have ended up, giving rise to an accumulation of forms. These forms are not designed by nature but by man. As such, they are an integral part of the history of 'design' – the history of the adaptation of form in order to create styles, worlds. The amalgamation of these different ways of understanding objects, and the nature of the spaces that can be created by using them, clearly reveals the various time codes embedded in the history of taste. Contemporaneity is not the 'here and now' presented to us, but is constructed out of numerous elements and decisions.

It is precisely this aspect that creates the area of intersection between this film and Marcahuasi, also produced specifically for the occasion. Marcahuasi is a plain to the east of the city of Lima (Peru) that extends across four square kilometres in the Andes. It is a remarkable stone formation of volcanic origin situated at more than 4,000 metres above sea level. The rocks, which are impressive not only because of their size but also because of their extraordinary forms, have prompted bizarre theories concerning their origin and given rise to evocative names. In the mid-1950s, Daniel Ruzo, regarded by some as an eminent archaeologist and by others as a prophet and cryptographer, wrote an essay in which he declared that the stones are 'sculptures' created by what he termed Masma Culture or the 'Fourth Humanity' more than 10,000 years ago.

The largest outdoor museum of sculpture in the world, Marcahuasi represents the possibility of turning upside-down the major archaeological and historical narratives. By focusing on places geographically and etiologically closer to Europe, these narratives have long ignored not only this place but others that in actuality mark the origins of culture and civilisation. Marcahuasi and the 'Fourth Humanity' call for a shift in the interpretation of the past and invoke a culture prior to the modernities we attribute to Egypt or Greece. They take their place once again in history, not just as exponents of a technologically advanced culture but as the die from which all other cultures are cast; as the primordial tribe.

The notion of the matrix or die is questioned in Untitled (Two frames #2), a piece that revolves around the idea that a distinction might exist between form and content, between content and container. Just as Ludwig Wittgenstein denied the existence of the mind as an entity separate from the body in his philosophical logic, so Armando Andrade Tudela plays with elements that are peripheral to the image and arranges them in such a way that they constitute the image itself. There is nothing else beyond; everything participates in the representation; no image is more real than any other, as everything is arranged around reality. What we term a document is an effort to get close to the limit of verisimilitude, but it is no more true than this play of reflections. The difference between a 'realist' system of representation and another that is formal or abstract is the way that its relationship with access to immediate knowledge of the world is structured. Whereas a realistic system conceives of the possibility of obtaining information through images, formal and abstract systems deny or simply minimise the importance of the connection between what we see and the world beyond.

The work constantly establishes links with the history of modernity, the history of architecture and its reception in Latin America. However, rather than referring to specific projects, Armando Andrade Tudela alludes to the osmosis that exists between the widely known and disseminated modes of architecture of the 1950s and others that represent their phantom, their counter-image.

Publication
#01 Armando Andrade Tudela. Ahir, demà is the first issue of a new electronic publication that complements the activity in the Capella MACBA: the Capella MACBA Series, available in http://www.macba.cat/serie-capella.

Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA)
Plaça dels Angels, 1
08001 Barcelona
http://www.macba.cat