I’m constantly amazed by the diversity, depth and creativity of the artists in Buenos Aires, especially when I look at ArtInfo and scratch my head wondering at the taste and sanity of those participating in the international art market.

Two words: Damien Hirst.

Here in Capital Federal, I keep wondering why Buenos Aires doesn’t get more global attention, other than for its street art.

Perhaps it’s because, for the most part, artists here have gone their own way, even from each other. Sure, there are microtrends but they really don’t last long and no one pays them too much attention.

I remember a conversation I had with Cesar Menegazzo of Wussmann Gallery about this subject. Without going into detail, he simply concluded that the art and artists of the Rio de la Plata were maybe too idiosyncratic to be understood by norteamericanos or art investors from the European union. All to the better, I thought. Better to grow your own way.

To understand how provincial the traditional market is, you have to step outside of it. I’m glad I did, else I wouldn’t have discovered Santiago García Sáenz, Alejandro Bovo Theiler, Gabriel Grún, Carlos Huffman, Alfredo Srur or street artists Pol Corona, Mart and Roma, just to name a handful of my favorite artists here in Buenos Aires.

In tribute to the spirit of Argentine independent art and to mark the last regular posting here on Juanele AR, Spanish-language editor Gabriela Schevach and I have curated two small best-of galleries to commemorate the occasions. We’ve culled the images from our Weekend Portfolios and they by no means present an exhaustive list.

Gabriela Schevach’s selections:

Thanks also to all the artists and art-lovers who have championed our work: Neurorama, Eduardo Gil, Lisa Goldapple, Max Paarlberg, Skye Brannon, Kate Sedgwick and Pol Corona, in particular.

Special thanks and kudos to my Spanish-language editor, Gabriela Schevach, whose seriousness, humor and kindness I appreciate in equal measure. I’ve frequently been awed by Gabi’s ability to craft an elegant sentence out of a complex idea and in a language not native to her. Gabi, good luck on your next projects.

Juanele AR may continue to publish irregularly — and who knows what else we may have up our sleeve — but today is definitively the last day of regular publishing.

Suerte y nos vemos!
 

Sign up for the free Juanele Weekly.

In Mexican Pre-Hispanic societies, art had very different purposes than in the contemporary Western context. It related to religion, its rituals and the worship of the gods. Here we present a selection of pictures of the Pre-Columbian statues exhibited at Fundación Proa until January 8th.

Gods, Rites and Crafts of Pre-Hispanic Mexico

Through January 8th, 2012

Fundación Proa
Av. Pedro de Mendoza 1929, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Tuesday – Sunday, 11 AM – 7 PM

Sign up for the free Juanele Weekly.

 
Vision orients oneself in space, ignoring certain relevant details that make it possible to distinguish one zone from another. When walking down the street, a necessary coordination between the eyes that observe and the feet that move happens almost naturally. With the camera against the face, the photographer looks through the viewfinder, facing perspective from a single point.

Bruno Dubner, Photography from the series Ajeno

At MAMBA, Bruno Dubner has installed a line of photographs that starts on a wall and continues on the adjacent one, turning around half the room. They are located at eye-level and grouped under the title, Ajeno (Alien), a neutral and distant term that isn’t either uncanny or familiar or defined as private or public. Anyway, it becomes clear that the alien doesn’t belong. That’s why, although we may look at it hard, it will remain unavailable for anyone to act upon it.

Bruno Dubner, Photography from the series Ajeno

The images register textures, planes of color and materials that can be seen as the viewer looks downwards, in the direction required for the attentive walker — the person who wants to know where and what the feet are stepping on. But Dubner’s vision bends away from the footstep, turning towards the line where the floor tiles reach the outer walls of the buildings that raise perpendicularly. That encounter “locked-up in fragments,” as Fabio Kacero points out in the exhibition text, isn’t casual or coincidental and still it doesn’t make any comprehensible sense. Nevertheless, the fragmentary information is enough to understand what the images depict. But Dubner’s distant look doesn’t provide any answer. Rather it keeps repeating the question that reaches the eyes with its endless variations.

Bruno Dubner, Ajeno, installation view

In the photos, forms, colors, grids, and structures change. Details recall different time periods, different histories. Displayed in a horizontal row, the photos exist in the same room at the same historical moment. We can ask how long that lasts, what relation exists among the surfaces depicted. The time of the photos is ephemeral as is the utilitarian look that scans the angles and soon returns to eye-level while the feet move forward on the sidewalk.

Bruno Dubner, Ajeno, installation view

Abstract as a group of isolated details gathered in a new context, and at the same time as concrete as certain moments of walking down a street, the scenes from Ajeno contain nothing theatrical in them. Dubner’s gesture appropriates what doesn’t belong when it photographs those lines on the ground and displaces them to eye-level. In his installation, the photos revolve around one of the angles between two walls of the room, reproducing, vertically, the angles in the pictures, that low, alien line on the side. The logic that gathered these surfaces remains a secret in plain view.

Bruno Dubner, Ajeno, installation view with guests

Bruno Dubner
Ajeno(Alien)

Through mid March 2012

Museo de Arte Moderno – MAMBA
Av. San Juan 350, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Monday – Friday, 12 – 7 PM
Weekends, 11 AM – 8 PM
December 31st through January 7 PM
Closed on December 30th and January 1st

Bruno Dubner, Ajeno, installation view with guests

Sign up for the free Juanele Weekly.

Bio from the artist

I’m Teko van Kuyk, 23-years old, and I’m a visual artist. I was born in Switzerland and at age two I moved to New Zealand. When I was 6, I moved to Brazil.

I think I’ve always drawn, actually, I can’t remember a time in my life when I haven’t done it. As a child, I attended painting and drawing workshops. I’ve been living in Buenos Aires for the last five years and since then I have been dedicated to painting.

My production has a sensitive character — based on human qualities and relations in general, but, above all, on love. Behind those characters often sinister and with the look of empty shells (as I call them) you can always notice a charming and calm message. At least that’s what’s happening in the last period of my production.

In this last phase, I’ve been employing recycled materials found as leftovers in flea markets. I’ve recovered them and appropriated them through painting.

My paintings are a reflection of my innocent and harmonic way of interpreting the world. I usually ignore petty things and their conflictive consequences and so, with the same skill, do my characters with their long noses and empty eyes.

Teko van Kuyk

Teko van Kuyk.

Sign up for the free Juanele Weekly.

Ten years on, the memory still burns bright. Demonstrators, organized by Quebracho, marched along Av. de Mayo from 9 de Julio, ending at Plaza de Mayo. Vandals set the government Christmas tree on fire, burning the decorations down to the metal frame. Photographer Patricio Murphy shares his photos from both 2001 and 2011.

Buenos Aires, 2011. Photo by Patricio Murphy.

Sign up for the free Juanele Weekly.

The photos were shot underwater and provide an evocative perspective and a sensation of calm and beauty about old age. Considering that water is an element that can bring relief to people who are near death, Elbert’s look strikes for its visual poetry and the serenity of the bodies suspended in water.

The peaceful passage

In the beginning, we easily floated, weightless, no obstacle around us. The water-cradle rocked us in its perennial cushioning. Nobody could harm us or offend us there; nothing could make us sad.

We stayed in a trance until we got carried through an underground corridor to the inescapable estuary and then we were born wet. That became the first passage and Tali Elbert, in her previous project, took pictures of it. It was the moment of birth, that tosses us, according to an ancient metaphor, into the river of life. That metaphor, containing the rapids as well as the bends, warns us that nothing’s possible without this vital fluid — neither the cultivation of seeds, nor the construction of cities or the sustenance of the body.

The murmuring rain, a sweet river, a brimming and fresh glass of water are essential elements, such as the blessing and moisturizing dew or a kiss. If we could only feed on liquid, the kingdom of need wouldn’t exist. Nevertheless, we die dry, withered and alone, in the quietness of our own desert. That’s the last passage for everyone.

Tali Elbert has photographed elderly people moving in water. Far from birth, they let the soft stream lead them through their own river of forgetfulness — another classic metaphor. In the pictures, calm and mercy prevails, a sort of light on the surface of water. The sparkles of a beneficent pool.

Between arrival and departure, in the long course that transfers us between light and darkness, we are just passing through. It’s a certainty that can’t be appealed. Tali Elbert wants to leave a record of this in the peaceful, almost sweet form of a possible passage. The bodies photographed here seem to be quietly waiting, in serene transit, as in a jellyfish garden, beyond all pain, without memory, without suffering.

Text by Christian Ferrer, philosopher

Tali Elbert
Pasaje

Through February 29th, 2012

Museo Emilio Caraffa
Av. Poeta Lugones 411, Córdoba, Argentina

Tuesday – Sunday and holidays, 10 AM – 8 PM
Wednesday, free

Tali Elbert.

Sign up for the free Juanele Weekly.

 
The title of Arta magazine takes off from Marta Minujín’s phrase “harta de arte” (“fed up with art”). Each issue concentrates on the work of one or two invited artists who assemble a group of previously unpublished texts and images that somehow relate to each other, but not in a direct, descriptive manner. Intended as an artistic object, changing with each publication, except for the format and size (14 x 18 cm), Arta also becomes an object in the catalog of each invited artist and therefore “open[s] new meanings, enrich[es] and expand[s] the encounter of the reader with contemporary art,” according to their Web page.

Luis Terán, Arta Revista N#5.

Arta Nº 5, featuring sculptor Luis Terán, revolves around the axis of habitat/home and, right from the outset, creates a game of reflexes. A photograph, a nightscape of a patio with its walls, plants and pots, occupies the cover of the magazine. On the back cover, an almost identical image mirrors the first one, separated by the seams of the binding, producing a distortion of the geometry and thereby questioning the difference between the “real” and its reflection, the inverted image.

Arta N#5, centerfold by Luis Terán

At the same time, by keeping the magazine open to look simultaneously at the cover and back cover and then rotating it to observe the centerfold, one finds another image-reflection pair of photos of the same patio — this time a daytime view. The main difference between right and left, besides the perspective, consists in the fact that only on the right does Terán himself appear crouching among the plants with a camera against his face. And this further complicates things. Is there a mirror in front of the photographer? Or has anyone else, another observer, shot the picture?

Arta N#5, invited artist Luis Terán

Another image takes over an interior spread. This time it consists, in turn, of a picture of a magazine’s spread, in which the title quotes the artist in the style of celebrity interviews and reads, “I’m always between the workshop and the patio,” as if both places could change places, one turning into the patio of the sculptor and the other into the workshop of the gardener.

Arta N#5, work by Luis Terán

The texts that Terán selects don’t discuss sculpture. Lutherine describes how the “collaboration between areas as diverse as entomology and bricolage” become necessary to research the mechanisms of the spider’s silk. The final line refers to the alteration of “the mechanics of visual perception.” In his own text, The Patio Gardener and Flowerpot Symbiosis, Terán focuses on the unavoidable interaction between the gardener and the insects and seeds brought by the wind — the possibilities of either being deceived or dominating the situation. He tells how he documented the growth of a spider, how he fed it among flowers, leaves and a spider’s web. In the process of symbiosis, he assures that the arachnid has felt how the gardener negotiated with the environment to keep the shapes in the space under its control.

Inés Acevedo, who wrote Wild Yeast, also tried to control form and growth, but by negotiating the time that the dough takes to react to the action of natural yeast. Mariano Blatt’s contribution mixes time, the sound of a voice and the shape of a desired body in Relax, You’re not Going to be Able to Describe This Moment at This Moment. Blatt describes a bus trip in which he passes through the labyrinthine streets of Parque Chas, and briefly falls in love with a skater that raves in his imagination. In English and Spanish, the texts mirror each other on the page, taking up the first and last three sheets of the magazine respectively.

Luis Terán, Cirugía Estética at Beca Kuitca/UTDT, installation view

In Cirugía Estética (Plastic Surgery), his recent exhibit at Beca Kuitca/UTDT, Luis Terán installed a series of works that reflected on classical sculptural problems such as the characteristics of materials, their flexibility, form and weight. He also kept in mind their economic and symbolic values and how to distribute and display shapes within the room, taking into account the objects’ movements and balance. All these experimental shapes, mostly in the subdued colors of wood and rubber, seemed to be closely watched from a backcloth hanging on the background wall, supporting a group of masks and characters painted with fluorescent spray paint.

Arta N#5, work by Luis Terán

In his patio, Terán photographs tiny animals that move among the vegetation, where the species and characters observe each other and negotiate a balance, not always achieved in harmony and freedom. In the second half of the magazine, we can see photos of objects constructed in the sculptor’s studio. Built of ceramic, perhaps related to cups and other gastronomic containers, they’re now made strange, as if a spider had completed them in the same way as it builds its own web. On the next page, a set of shelves and logs mixes faces and hands, sculptures and people who observe and control each other, negotiate, live together and mirror the images that surround them.

Arta Revista

Get it at:

Purr Libros, Santa Fe 2927, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Tienda Malba, Av. Figueroa Alcorta 3415, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Cobra, Aranguren 150, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Galería Ernesto Catena, Honduras 4882, Buenos Aires, Argentina

And other book stores.

Arta Blog

Arta N#5, work by Luis Terán

Sign up for the free Juanele Weekly.

On the other hand, he remembers, “during my teens in the ‘70s, almost the only access to the erotic image, or the most commonly available, were the photo-stories for adults, such as Killing, a bizarre magazine from France. It was a typical pulp publication, with black and white pictures that mixed murder and policemen with women in underwear. Printed on cheap paper, you could see that the photos were manually retouched.”

In his Serie Noir, de la Fuente tells an erotic story, a narration of images in high contrast and low-resolution, inspired by the aesthetics of film noir and the low quality of pulp graphics. This low-fi texture emerges in relation to the bodies and the displacement of information towards a defective code.

In this sense, it has been said that eroticism, unlike pornography, is a genre where light appears soft and makes it possible to observe the details. Porn, on the other side, uses a plain kind of lighting, with a limited scale of gray between black and white, mainly because of the poor information that reaches the camera. De la Fuente wants to investigate the relation between photographic realism, visual quality and the erotic charge in the images.

Marcelo de la Fuente and others
Confluencias

Through December 20th

Fondo Nacional de las Artes
Alsina 673, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Monday – Friday, 10 AM – 6 PM

Marcelo de la Fuente, Serie Noir.

Sign up for the free Juanele Weekly.

 
Since 1991, the Beca Kuitca grant program has offered young artists working in different disciplines to produce new work individually and also in interaction with each other, all while in dialogue with artist Guillermo Kuitca. Kuitca, one of Argentina’s internationally acclaimed painters, has directed and organized the program since its inception. The Beca (Grant) assigns a working space to each participant and has operated at different institutions throughout Buenos Aires. For the most recent edition, the fifth, the studios were set up at Di Tella University, which includes a large exhibition hall and also Espacio Beca (Grant Space), which is another, smaller space for the display of grant holders’ visual work.

Luciana Lamothe, installation view

The artists who participated in this edition of Beca Kuitca / UTDT concluded the program last week with diplomas and celebrations. They began working at the University last year and began a series of weekly presentations of their work on October 15th. Presentations took place every Saturday afternoon and consisted mostly of one-day-exhibits that lasted until December 3rd.

Jazmín López, istallation view.

The cycle began with an installation by Luciana Lamothe in the large exhibition hall, complemented by an action of artist group Rosa Chancho, who added sound to the room, applying heavy blows to different points on the outside walls. The same day in Espacio Beca, Jazmín López showed the neo-gothic visions of her large paintings.

Mariana López, installation view

In the following week, Esas telas no importan (Those canvases don’t matter), by Mariana López, turned the hall into a kind of trattoria, with tablecloths covering most of the table tops. A closer look revealed that the cloths were actually painter’s canvases falling heavily over the sides of each table. López painted them with lines and spots that deformed and interfered with the traditional geometry of the striped coverings. A selection of art history books with modified covers later adorned the head of a group of “dinner guests” that sat around the table for a performance that was filmed.

Nicanor Aráoz y Martín Legón

At the center of the smaller room, Nicanor Aráoz presented a sculpture of hands, flowers and a pair of paper eyes on a block of foam rubber that seemed to observe the paintings by Martín Legón hanging around them on the walls. Legón’s circle of pictures wrapped the spectator in a world of almost transparent hallucinations, locked up in hard plastic and wooden frames.

Painting by Martín Legón

Tiziana Pierri, installation view

On the following Saturday, the same space became completely different. Tiziana Pierri had strategically installed her paintings and drawings in such a way that modified the perception of the angles of the room. Simultaneously, Nicanor Aráoz and Martín Legón had organized a retrospective of Anabella Papa. Her characters appear on the surface of the paintings, where they seem to permanently transform their bodies while staying still.

Painting by Anabella Papa

Florencia Rodríguez Giles used the same room and turned it into a stage for the theatre piece she developed in collaboration with Agustina Muñoz. The actors moved around the different platforms while they asked in a loud voice about the sense of their acts and desires. Meanwhile, Sofía Bohtlingk displayed her pictorial abstractions in the smaller space.

Photographic work by Nicolás Mastracchio

In mid-November, Juan Tessi exhibited his abstract canvases based on another series that carefully followed the instructions of a make-up tutorial. On the other walls of the same room, Nicolás Mastracchio showed two videos and a selection of photos in which apparently simple images of reality become confused with their reflections and representations. In the smaller space, Rosario Zorraquín employed a group of monitors, TV sets and screens to present a series of videos staging fictional situations that seemed to absurdly converse with actual scenes on television.

Rosario Zorraquín, video

The sculptor Luis Terán occupied the exhibition room on November 19th with a series of works that reflected on classical sculptural problems such as the characteristics of materials, their flexibility, form, weight, but also their economic and symbolic value. Máximo Pedraza exhibited paintings and sculptures in the more compact Espacio Beca, combining families of characters, landscapes and the biography of Uruguayan artist Juan Figari with his wife and children, his work and his travels across the Atlantic Ocean.

Luis Terán, installation view

Gaspar Libedinksy presented a collection of clothing made with rags and dish towels, imagining and representing which kind of garment each cloth would like to become. At the same time, artist Mauro Guzmán’s video installation combined five experimental videos that played with the idea of making narration strange, — humour and dramatic action mixed with abstract and oneiric images.

Máximo Pedraza, detail

The cycle ended last Saturday with an exhibition by Carlos Herrera and Eduardo Basualdo while the rest of the artists opened their studios and expanded into the Espacio Beca. Some of them took the chance to show work that they couldn’t display at their presentation and so the afternoon turned into the evening and then the night and visitors continued walking around and discovering new things to look at.

Gaspar Libedinsky, Rejilla y Repasador. Photo: Gaspar Libedinsky

Basualdo installed a delicately formless object, looking sort of like a black tent, done with a metallic sheet, fine and malleable as paper and pierced with holes. The light of the room entered through them, but the inside of the object feels oddly dark and isolated. From outside, it seems a huge and hungry worm. Carlos Herrera’s works, displayed around it, carefully mixe elements from the world of sports and of heavy labor, of hygiene and sweat, while a piece of Argentine meat, geometrically cut, waits on the floor as if it were something else — something that doesn’t threaten to rot and take over the rest of the space.

Carlos Herrera and Eduardo Basualdo, installation view

Sign up for the free Juanele Weekly.

Hola otra vez, creo que esta entrada es de las largas.

Como situación interesante de la semana podemos revelar que NEURORAMA hizo una sesión de terapia. Cara a cara los dos miembros fundadores de la empresa sacaron los trapitos al sol frente a un diplomado matriculado que hincó en los puntos mas débiles del dúo con el solo fin de llevarnos al punto de catarsis.

No podemos develar los motivos del encuentro, es como LAS VEGAS, lo que pasa en terapia queda en terapia; pero lo bueno es que ahora que Axtor y yo nos sacamos las mascaras podemos trabajar con aire puro y eso es beneficioso para todos, tanto para nosotros como para usted, querido lector fiel.

La paranoia es una de mis características mas adorables así que planeo amenazar al doctor para que no cuente todo lo que sabe.  La paranoia en la mayoria de los casos es un seguro de vida.

En  esta entrada no pienso contar mucho de las ideas ni del proceso creativo de Neurorama, no es mi intención aburrir a nadie. Pero sepan que tormentas se estan gestando siempre en nuestros cuarteles.

Pasen por el sitio de NEURORAMA y véanlo renovado.
Aparentemente Axtor mediante sus diseños intenta manipular mentes; es su modo de vida.

Por ultimo lo verdaderamente importante (click en el link debajo):

TROPIC OF CANCER

Despidamos el año de la mejor manera, compren regalos geniales ahora, este sábado, con tiempo, no esperen al 24 para comprar regalos navideños, eso genera caos en la ciudad y nos malhumora a todos.

FERIA AMERICANA – ARTE – HAPPENING – MUSIC – CHEF- CANCER FIGHTING LIVE!!!

FERIA: Eat me// Yinyer// remate vintage// Collarini// emedef

¿Qué clase de anacoreta no va a una fiesta tan prometedora?

Paz

Juanele AR and Neurorama team up again.

Sign up for the free Juanele Weekly.