New Genres: South America

The Plush Era by Gerónimo Araquistain at Cultural Center San Martin

April 26, 2023 | nadiaevangelina

"La Era del Peluche" (The Plush Era) is a solo exhibition by Argentine artist Gerónimo Damián Araquistain at the Cultural Center San Martin, located in Buenos Aires. The proposal revolves around a series of large-sized Spanish plush playing cards, whose objective is to offer an analysis of the significance of Spanish playing cards in our society and especially in Latin America.

Gerónimo Araquistain

The pieces are exhibited in the hall of the cultural center, a central space that captivates the attention of the spectators. The pop aesthetics, in contrast with the black walls, create a very striking atmosphere. Behind this visually captivating world, the artist intends to leave us with a reflection on the relationship between colonialism and Latin America. For the artist, the cards are not a game, but "the motif of a relationship between our everyday life".

Throughout this exhibition, Araquistain invites us to rethink those cards loaded with images of kings, knights, swords, golds, clubs, and cups that correspond to European iconography and not to Latin American culture. This is how the artist appropriates the figure of the playing card to create one of his own, such as "The Queen of Quinoa" under a pop aesthetic. The playing cards are an example of imitating and transfiguring the commonplace, that is, transferring an everyday object and its functionality to an artistic space, as an object with an aesthetic function.

Gerónimo Araquistain

Araquistain's plush playing cards are an attempt to reconfigure the present by altering symbols of the past that are still every day. For the artist, the Spanish playing cards do nothing more than cover up the processes of colonization and the Eurocentric gaze. Therefore, the artist reveals that "there is no alternative but to resignify the conquering sword and begin the decolonizing process".

Araquistain operates from the threshold through the seduction of the softness of the material (plush), which always keeps us in the limits of the textile or the pictorial, of the plane or the object. Pop aesthetics also contribute to the attempt to reconfigure the present from the alteration of symbols of the past that, as I mentioned before, continue to operate today. The preoccupation with color, composition, and form is present in a group of abstract works that are part of this exhibition and that accompany the saga of playing cards and one of the divas of Renaissance painting.

"La Era del Peluche"

Location: Cultural Center San Martin, Sarmiento 1551, C1042 ABC, Buenos Aire (Argentina)

Opening Date: 2nd March, 2023

End Date: 7th May 2023

Working hours: Monday-Sunday: 8am to 22 pm

Official website: https://elculturalsanmartin.ar/

https://www.instagram.com/elculturalsanmartin/?hl=es

Participating Artist:

Gerónimo Araquistain

Argentina

"Dia de Campo"- a solo exhibition by the Peruvian artist Iosu Aramburu

April 11, 2023 | nadiaevangelina

"Día de Campo" (Field Day) is a solo exhibition by visual artist Iosu Aramburu at Pasto Gallery in Buenos Aires. Iosu's work includes paintings that explore modernism in the Andean region, named after the area over the Andes Mountains and comprising a large part of South America, usually marginalized in the history of Latin American art. The avant-garde and the South American countryside dialogue in this proposal can be visited in the heart of the autonomous city of Buenos Aires.

Installation view

Born in Lima, Peru, Iosu also works with sculptures and installations. His research and artistic project recover the bases of the Andean avant-garde that emerged between the beginning and the middle of the last century. These works sought to break the prevailing image of peasants as backward and degraded agents of society. The indigenist gaze allowed working tools to cease to be seen as a "technical backwardness" and become invitations to think of modernity that takes into account indigenous traditions.

In this sense, the works of the Andean avant-garde wanted to leave behind the imaginary of the countryside as a representation of melancholy for a distant past or of peasants as a crude body of work. These ideas were taken up again a few decades ago after the defeats of the popular movements in South America. This is where Iosu enters the scene. The works exhibited in "Dia de campo" review the figurative style and the conceptual bases of this movement of the last century.

Installation view

Painting from the installation

The artist returns to problematize the conflicts of the native peoples over the expropriation of their lands, an economic and political issue that prevails today in the Andean region. Through images that portray different scenes of the countryside -and its imaginary-, Iosu tries to bring our attention back to issues that are losing historical substance in the present. The struggles of peasants and native peoples have long been made invisible by history -and art history as well. That history was denied by the colonizers, landowners, and bourgeoisie. However, the countryside was for a time the place of revolution and the emergence of a new subjectivity.

"Dia de Campo" invites us to look at and imagine the rural world in a new way, as it was thought of by the Andean avant-garde in the last century. For curator Mijail Mitrovic, Iosu's works aim to bring these ways of imagining the countryside to the present to "attend to our pending appointment with the past".