PIAV 2019-2020. Cultural Universes: Identities, Recognitions and Manipulations

Registering habits and customs in the current Bolivian Altiplano, Florencia Blanco focuses in Salón de eventos, a social meetings and events hall designed by Freddy Mamani, a famous architect of the region that found that the western constructive aesthetics represented neither him nor his people.

In its place, he created a manner that mixes baroque elements, stylization of ancestral forms and present architectonic types, resulting in the Andean architecture style, which, due to its particular features, transcended the borders of his country.

Starting from a handcraft practice of the locality of Cafayate in Salta, Roxana Ramos Navarro partners with Sixto Maita, an expert in the weaving technique and its raw material, to design Sin tiempo.

This object is presented as an example of resistance to the contemporary aesthetics that, starting from their global spreading, impose hegemonic and colonial discourses. Thus it turns into an emblem of rescue and revaluation of local traditions.

Moreover, Rocío Fernández Charro, with her diptych in the shape of an altarpiece Retratos, visits and denaturalizes the genre announced in the title.

Photographing portrait paintings from their golden age, she intervenes them digitally annulling the central point of this genre: the identity of the faces, as she covers them with a hypertrophy of the costume.

In Equilibrio térmico, Federico Gloriani uses Thermodynamics laws and the kinetic gas theory to study the works of artists from his same city, establishing relations and comparing pairs of creators of different rank and origin, whose measurements relate and balance.

Thus he builds some sort of metaphor regarding the strong micro-environmental cohesion of the art scene in Rosario, considering the productions of Norberto Puzzolo, a representative of the 1960’s avant-garde with a prestigious career, and the very young Mariana De Matteis.

Federico Barabino refers to Lucio Fontana, another creator born in Rosario, as he works on the erased text of Manifiesto Blanco. In Manifiesto Blanco perforado, he pierces where the punctuation marks were –those essential “holes” between the words– and, in this way, he mentions the origin of the spatialist aesthetic conceived and initiated in Argentina in 1946.

The luminosity of the light fixture that conforms the artwork focuses on those holes, but instead of decreasing the mystery suggested by the cosmic darkness that Fontana’s bucchi let us glimpse, it leads us to a transcendental blinding space.

Starting from photographs of family events, Carlos Cima translates to the pictorial language celebration icons, such as the typical photo of a wedding cake.

The textures, the richness of materials and the versatility of the strokes turn a subject that is by nature considered excessive into baroque, while the color range in which the grey colors prevail, takes the subject to the melancholic zone of memories.

From a different perspective, in the paintings of Manuel Aja Espil the art history seems to interfere as a specific quote or as a way of realization in which the imprecise feeling of a recognizable style roams.

In them, we can see other cultural references, such as characters from comic books and animations that are related to obsolete technology devices.

Fata Morgana is submerged in a dreamlike foggy atmosphere where the possible recall of an odd scene from a storybook mixes with the illusory effect perceived in front of a frozen landscape on a trip: a fatamorgana

Manifesting a very clear adhesion that impregnates her iconography and peculiarities of her art, Magnadela Petroni defines herself as a member of a subculture that finds a shelter from the pressure of capitalist society in “dance, parties, techno and tunning”.

The artist covers the bumper of a car with a synthetic material that looks like skin, “customizing” it to make it one with the body and prefigure a type of mankind that is not only culturally identified with the machine, but biologically fused with it.