Back to the future: reviving an icon of the 1970s avant-garde in Buenos Aires
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Presse18.07.2019
Beyond preserving the foundations of the old CAyC, waldengallery seeks to extrapolate them and visit the paths still unexplored. Picking up the CAyC’s insurgent spirit (but pointedly rejecting the internal masculine bias for which it was later critiqued), the gallery aspires to shed light on the contemporary Latin American subaltern. These efforts include paintings by the beloved queer Paraguayan artist Feliciano Centurión, and the conceptual practices of proto-feminist Mexican powerhouses Magalí Lara and Mónica Mayer (to whom the first number of waldengallery’s own publication, Yulinda, is dedicated).
Other gallery artists, Ocampo Feris notes, share the same ‘accumulation of marginalities – political, sexual, and exiled bodies’ that the CAyC bristled against. One, Rodolfo Marqués, offers a kind of high/low technology birthed by poverty: He assembles all kinds of ostensibly cutting-edge devices (gaming consoles, screens) using wood, sheet metal, and other cheap materials, as if the future itself could be bootlegged. When computers appear in his work, they have a transparent and accessible aspect. With echoes of Grippo and Gamarra’s communal oven, Marqués explains that he aims ‘to propagate “open source” as a method of production and also as an aesthetic. You can ask how it was made, you can make it yourself; it’s all about collective knowledge.’
It is a faith – if no longer in utopian promise, then in collective knowledge – that animates not only the artists of waldengallery and La Ene, but many Argentine artists working today. The echoes of the past intrude on the present, just as the tolling bells of the old Santa Catalina de Siena convent on Viamonte Street invade the retro-futurist gallery space. Such calls, Dourron says, ‘rally us, through art, to start a conversation about our own pressing needs.’
For more art news from Argentina, including the forthcoming Art Basel Cities: Buenos Aires activation at Collins Park during the Art Basel Miami Beach show in December 2019, please click here.
Top image: Archival materials from the Centro de Arte y Comunicación, which are being digitized by waldengallery. Image courtesy of waldengallery, Buenos Aires.
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18.07.2019Presse »
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