The Pulverized Image

Dust is an accumulation of minute particles, an abstract mass that can exist in all the states of matter. We live with it and is part of us but is not only a dispersed mass. It can also be a concentrate, forming solid bodies.  This exhibition considers dust a metaphor through which to tell a dispersed and diluted history of abstract art in the second half of the 20th century through a selection of works from the IDB Art Collection, while emphasizing the singular qualities of each work of art.

In the work of Brazilian artist Thais Helt Salgado, the oval is a recurring shape that refers us to the locus where all things originate and form, and to the cyclical processes of biological and psychic phenomena. Evoking the figures of the egg and the womb, the oval appears often as a negative space, a teeming void in a simultaneous state of growth and disintegration. Helt Salgado’s work carries on the tradition of Brazilian neo-concrete aesthetics while signaling a radical departure. 

In some ancient cultures, the spatial arrangement of a city was analogous, and in accordance with a spiritual and cosmological conception of the universe. The symbolic representation of landscape as unified order is a central theme in Pascual Rodrigo's work. In the 1990s Pascual  lived and worked in the United States for more than ten years. While living in Washington, D.C., Pascual adopted the somber palette and flat textural surfaces that characterize his post-minimalist abstract paintings.

Dominican artist Elvis Avilés is an important figure within the neo-expressionist international movement of the 1980s. The resurgence of gestural abstraction and the organic textures of art informed his work and led him to formulate a renewed approach. For him, the surface of the canvas is like an archeological site. Yet, gathering the residual elements of his immediate urban landscape means turning away from the city to dig into the stories that speak of its endurance and slow disintegration.

Located more than 5,000 feet above sea level, La Rinconada is one of the most exploited gold mines in the Andean region of Peru, a city of approximately sixteen thousand inhabitants, most of them of indigenous descent, living under extreme weather conditions and inhaling the toxic gases released by exposed garbage mounts. Part of a series of photographs taken in 2014, Untitled invites the viewer to reflect on the difficulty of aestheticizing the natural and human landscape of La Rinconada.

In the Greek epic poem The Iliad, the Homeric image of the underworld is one where mist and shadows reign, the dwelling place of the heroes’ souls. Removed from the realm of light, this world of invisibility is also a repository of memory, as it is where the heroes and heroines go to meditate on their past and narrate the most disturbing events of the war. In the paintings of Honduran artist Byron Lombardo Mejia, the Homeric underworld appears as a psychic and mythical place.

The body and the face constitute central motifs in the work of artist Gracia Barrios. Her artistic practice was directly impacted by the violence carried out by the Chilean military dictatorship. Yet, her work does not aim to provide a graphic documentation of events or stand as mere representation of subjects, but to subvert and critique media culture and the construction of political and social subjectivities by combining opposed artistic tendencies such as pop art and gestural abstraction. 

Matilde Marin’s conceptual approach to printmaking has been a constant since the beginning of her artistic practice in the 1980s. Building up on a tradition that can be traced all the way back to the work of neo-concrete Brazilian artist Lygia Pape and her “Tecelar” (Weaving) series from 1954, Marin's conceptual investigations weave in a reflection around the reversibility of an image fixed onto a two-dimensional surface but resulting from a physical activity.

An important figure within the global phenomenon of abstract art that resonated throughout the 20th century, Japan-born Brazilian artist Tomie Ohtake was influenced by the Japanese calligraphic tradition and by the intellectual and artistic work of other Japanese expatriates living in  São Paulo. Ohtake mastered printmaking and painting techniques while developing her own unique artistic style, and in 1954 joined the Group Seibi-Kai, working closely with Manabu Mabe and Takashi Fukushima.

In the work of Colombian artist Delcy Morelos, the degradation of red functions as a metaphor for the debasement of the human body as closeness or distancing from the earth. To go from red to orange or from red to brown is to go from blood to mud, or from fluid to residual pigment. In establishing a dialogue between the sculptural geometric language of minimalist art and the intensity of color in abstract expressionism, Morelos’ work weaves in the relationship between content and container.