Review: Alternate Pathways
Surpik Angelini. Artist, Independent Curator, and Writer.
When multidisciplinary Venezuelan artist Luisa Duarte and Argentinean fine art photographer Karen Navarro conceived a series of rotating group exhibitions titled “Alternate Pathways”, their object was to generate an ongoing cross cultural dialog, launched by this first exhibition to highlight the cultural diversity of artists living and working in Houston today.
For the first round, Navarro and Duarte invited a mixed media artist, Celan Bouillet; a painter of sculptural shaped canvases, Eduardo Portillo; and an artist and illustrator Hedwige Jacobs to join them in this project, thus bringing together representatives from three countries as distant and different from theirs as the US, El Salvador and The Netherlands.
Beyond the issues of “displacement, attachment to place, imaginary homelands, place making, the construction of identity and belonging,” which the group identified as a common ground, I believe that the way they surpassed the limits of the Modernist aesthetic inherited from the past, seems to speak to a grander scheme of things, while it also underlies their work in more significant ways.
Surpassing limits rather than simply choosing alternate pathways may seem inconsequential at first, but in my mind it helps focus our attention to how the artists have responded to two opposing forces impacting the development of contemporary art in the last twenty-five years. Globalization alone fostered an intense traffic of culture from the First World to developing countries, or simply from centers to peripheries, carrying with it, in all instances and everywhere, the imposition of Modernism as a lingua franca in the arts. The second force shaping the art of our times is a phenomena called “the ethnographic turn” since the 90”s, which injected local flavor, subjective specificity, and more importantly, a meaningful historical and cultural contextualization of the art produced in different parts of the world. The result of these two seminal forces is that most contemporary works today embody artists’ own micro narratives which counteract the master narrative prevalent in Modernist forms of expression. Therefore, with this framework in mind, I would like to address how each one of the artists in the present exhibition contests the inherited Modernist cannon in their own art.
Luisa Duarte’s visual language is grounded in lessons of subtle and nuanced modern geometric abstraction, an inevitable consequence of her formal training in architecture and design in Venezuela. However, in her most recent works, Duarte contextualizes her minimalist compositions with personal evocations of her homeland and newly discovered territories, as she alludes to shifting tensions between real and imaginary boundaries or to make believe shelters. Duarte’s personal micro-narratives challenge the otherwise impersonal, a temporal, and universalizing tendency inherent in Modernist abstraction.
To make images appear and disappear, to simulate and dissimulate visual effects through constructive and deconstructive methods would describe Karen Navarro’s artistic process. Her departure from stereotypical photographic portraits of her subjects is rendered by cutting and reassembling their facial features, intervening them with superimposed geometric matrixes. Her deconstructive methods
make images almost unrecognizable, reaching invisibility at times. Navarro’s work implies that identity is in fact a social construct, as she parodies the digitally deforming effects of apps like Snap Chat, face changer, faceapp, all of which fulfill the growing need of people to be recognized, or to be accept- ed in a certain social category, symbolized by their obsessive use of hash tags.
Hedwige Jacobs’s drawings create an inventive syntax for a variety of collective forms of emblematic human gatherings observed in our world today. Using minimal means, colored pencils on paper, Jacobs renders masses of people huddled and held back by invisible restraints, or a circle around a large empty space formed by countless celebrants and witnesses of a suggestive event, or a serpen- tine queue of people interrupted from time to time by faltering figures. Jacobs’s timely observations, tuned to significant and emancipatory collective experiences in our daily lives, have been hardly recognized in the past, as we have been blinded by to our Modernist Western involvement with indi- vidual consciousness.
Eduardo Portillo’s shaped canvases make references to works by such artists as Carmelo Arden Quin, the creator of the Madi movement in Argentina, or to the monochromatic minimalist works of Ellsworth Kelly. Within this Modernist aesthetic, Portillo creates a unique personal signature, inserting subtle imperfections, tiny tweaks in his otherwise clean geometric forms, while also transgressing the paint- erly genre inherent to shaped canvasses, when placing them on the floor as sculptures. Another feature veering away from the established minimalist practice, is Portillo’s use of nuanced shades of colors adding to the effect of spatial illusion to his surfaces.
Celan Bouillet’s world consists in creating formless gardens, which contradict the very concept of formalist landscape design. In her sui generis painted gardens, we find a variety of natural forms sus- pended on monochrome backgrounds, suggesting fields devoid of gravitational force. Variously shaped stones are arranged in patterns that mimic microscopic organisms, or they spur unusual and strange kinds of vegetation. The overall effect of Bouillet’s weightless patterning overturns the idea of creating specific spaces linked in someway to the ground.