Nothing tends to be quite so present as what is not there. Absence has the habit, the vocation, the persistence of speaking with a silence that is more powerful than any shout. Just like a whisper frightens more than a peal of thunder, what winds up filling us with dread or alerting our senses tends to be a small noise in the patio that we cannot be sure if we actually heard or just invented. A slight creak, leaves trembling, a wind that comes from the other side [...]

Text: Fidel Sclavo

Cosmética (Cosmetics), by Martín Pelenur, a fanatic of craft and experimentation, is a pictorial adventure that puts plastic as raw material and the very meaning of the gaze into play. Cosmos, the origin of this action’s name, ponders the order of the stars but on the other side, chaos as well, suggesting the infinite and at the same time, the most palpable and ephemeral, contrasting the clean and pristine with the opaque and mysterious. In this project, painting reveals itself as a technique with a thousand variations, bringing gestures, colors, textures and shapes into the world, inscribed in its pure substance.

Text: Iosi Havilio

…Walden is a perfect forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer or rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it.
Text extract fromWalden, or Life in the Woods. Henry David Thoreau (1854)

The Coleridge Collection explores the diverse relationships and modalities that comprise art practice in its context, and it is a study of the ties between subjects and objects, whether their stories are real or fictional. These stagings, re-elaborations or montages look to invade viewers’ sensory domain in order to put intentional changes into operation in their memories and imagination. Uribe contributes to (re)inventing our identities and ways of belonging to this (his) place in the world.

Curator: Martín Craciun

Florencia Sadir’s most recent project takes the meanings and memory of water as its point of departure, as a resource under continual threat from contamination and its effects, the privatization of indigenous territory, the voracity of extractive industries and climate change due to the use of fossil fuels.
This exhibition is a testimony to stories that hinge on emotional ties and geographic circumstances that are activated to underscore the fragility of the earth’s water ecosystem. The scarcity of fresh water is a natural phenomenon, but it is also a consequence of human actions. These works remind us of that.

Curator: Miguel A. López

[...] "La Forma de las Cosas" [The Shape of Things], an exhibition by —Rafael Cabella (Montevideo, 1932-1992), José Luís Parodi (Montevideo, 1962) y Natalia Torterolo (San José, 1988). The show connects the work of three Uruguayan artists from different generations through painting and its ability to grasp the world... By evading the notion of good, erudite art, they embrace the freedom to do and be whatever they desire. Painting becomes a method of relating to the world, nothing more than that. As Tina Turner famously said, "We don't need another hero."

Curated by Martín Craciun

[...] Based on the nature of representation, these works embrace poetics and try out ideas regarding questions that emerge and appear repeatedly. They are germinal forms, in a state of latency that condenses their narrative potential as if in an embryonic state. This world of entities and beings makes up a symbolic machinery, in operation at the moment prior to forming a body.
Pursuing a question may well be a pertinent strategy for embracing this universe.

Curated by Martín Craciun

Paintings by Arden Quin from the Aléatoires Series, 1976.
Carmelo Arden Quin’s work alternatively resided in the visual arts and in literature. While living between Nice and Paris during the 1970s, he began a series of paintings on paper that draw upon both areas, which he called "Aléatoires" (Random).
"I like to create very simple things. […] I have a great belief in games, which are somehow a mirror of life, of struggle. In life, there is offense and defense. A game is a conflict, with someone else or with yourself". —Carmelo Arden Quin, 1988

Text: María Cristina Rossi

[...] For Ana, paper is a toxic love, much like clay: the relationship begins with rejection, damage and resistance, and the conquest, through caring and with the possibility that things may fail. There is a fictitious proposal of conquest, a fiction by way of denunciation, but it is another work in which no history is possible; there are no precise dates, just an intention to start over again. Some readings must be done by disconnecting some things from others. In Ana’s work, the principle of movement originates in the work and affects the artist, and this is why the movement generates disorder, converting the body into a living political archive.

Curated by Santiago Villanueva
Poem Marta Dillon

It is argued here that the process of creation for the entire group of works brought together in the Multitud de estados posibles project states bears similarities with cartographic production procedures, in the sense that both are activities of mapping the territories that the artist and mapmakers focus on. However, these are investigative actions that always generate partial representations of these spaces. If the works created by José Luis Landet or the maps elaborated by specialists were to become confused with the territories they seek to portray, they would lose their function as a guide for the other (visitor to an exhibition, traveler) on their journey through a complex universe. They would become redundant and as such, useless. By definition, representations of the world always fall short of what is being represented. To produce art or to draw geopolitical maps implies making decisions, highlighting certain frameworks created or found while traveling through and investigating a determined space. When shown all together, these frameworks (exhibited in an exhibition or printed in the form of a map) generate knowledge—necessarily partial and subjective—about specific territories, produced from unique points of view. The flag fragments, their re-readings by way of the loom, the poles, the paintings and the drawings that the artist brings together and presents in the exhibition space are the frameworks that he has invented in order to comprehend and orient himself in the ever-transforming world in which he lives.

Curated by Moacir dos Anjos

SUBTE and Walden Naturae present Rara Avis, an anthology exhibition of works by artist Ulises Beisso (1958-1996), from Montevideo, Uruguay.
This exhibition includes over one hundred works that have never been shown as a group before, where the majority of pieces will be on public display for the first time. Accompanying the exhibition are documents, illustrations and photographs (organized and cataloged following a long process of investigation) in addition to the documentary “La intención del Colibrí” (The Hummingbird’s Intentions) by Sergio De León. Ulises Beisso’s work is of a personal, sensitive and autobiographical nature, and it invites thought regarding the dissidences and diversity present in Montevideo´s cultural context during the eighties and early nineties from a perspective of identity.

Curated by Pablo León de la Barra
SUBTE Intendencia de Montevideo

The exhibition features two prolific artists from Montevideo, with works articulated in relation to a common interest. Tension between representation and figuration runs throughout this proposition to think of love in current times. The exhibition title—"La otra mitad del amor"—acts as a catalyst, guiding the gaze, risking connections and enabling a shared narrative. The exhibition presents a group of works that capture the eye and look to elicit interaction between the inner realm and the outside world, combining imagination and sensitive representations of mundane reality. Candela Bado shows a selection of ceramic sculptures, while Gonzalo Delgado exhibits his drawings and large format paintings. "La otra mitad del amor" makes reference to a group of publications "Half of Love / The Other Half of Love" [La mitad del amor / La otra mitad del amor] published in Uruguay in the late sixties, when a group of young writers, poets, critics and editors with a cosmopolitan spirit—the self denominated Generation of ‘45—ventured an approach to this theme, as human as it is universal.
The works on display are full of mimicry and desire, where their material aspect effectively manages to raise questions in a simple dialog—of formats and languages—between two contemporary creators.

It isn’t about love / we give life / and he asks me and I ask him / and he conquers me and I conquer him / and he finishes me and I finish him. Idea Villariño, Poemas de amor [Love Poems], 1962

Curated by Martín Craciun

Can any body appear, as Judith Butler asks herself? Can the norms of permitted corporality be cut through?
During the early days of pandemic reclusion, the absence of other bodies obliges me to have some register of my own. Following lines to their vanishing point and resisting thought no longer work.
The body as an instrument of pain, but also of pleasure.
Possibly empowered by the struggles of feminism and their questioning of gender, sexuality and race, the impulse arises to give visibility to soft, rounded, spongy bodies that expand in the landscape. A figure of resistance that allows itself the agency of desire. A flabby, territorialized body. My body.

In response to the confinement imposed by the virus, Guagnini (1966) developed a series of profile view drawings of figures emitting air. The virus is handled as discourse, as infection and as an aesthetic element. Walden presented the first paintings from this series at Art Basel’s OVR in 2020. The artist expanded four of these figures into large format with the theme of the four seasons, inadvertently foreshadowing the pandemic’s endemic nature. The monumental, porous figures evoke the metaphysical work of Roberto Aisenberg, who was Guagnini’s friend and mentor, in addition to keys in Uruguayan modernist Maria Freire’s work. By means of collaboration with the Alto Liso studio in Guadalajara, Mexico, Guagnini converts his paintings into extremely sophisticated tapestries. The studio brought techniques found in Europe at the Manufacture Royale des Gobelins in France into the mid-twentieth century, and into the reality of the state of Jalisco, with centuries of indigenous tradition in textiles. Commercially unavailable colors and shades are achieved by dying the wool; weavers work jointly with the artist on the design and its interpretation. This results in unique pieces, where lavish materials and visual potency engage to metabolize a traumatic event.
Drawings from the same series round out the exhibition, as do three ceramic pieces, in accordance with the artist’s interest in craft techniques. Two of these pieces were recently exhibited in Buenos Aries at MALBA, in the framework of the “Terapia” (Therapy) show, which examined the influence of psychoanalysis in Argentinean Art.

The hand is held with a twist of the wrist, barely sustained, it would seem, by a single finger. The vertical axis of the forearm floats, rather than resting on the vigorous thigh. Each leg has its own autonomy, as if one were fighting against the other to open in response to a desire stimulated by the red of the flowers and the lust in the face: the powerful nose is submerged in the camellias’ light fragrance. The hat covering the head indicates that winter has nearly ended, when some camellias bloom. Dressed in black like a village widow, alone on the green seats of the bus, she carries the plant with joy. It’s as if a loupe had been poised to focus on some detail of Aída Carballo’s series on buses. There is an empathy with the lives of common folk that lies between the certainty of the gaze and humor, based on exacerbated realism and bordering on the grotesque. It is also present in the silence of the couple at the bar, lost in thought, between the crossed arms and legs of one and the other, disconnected within surroundings that are almost unreal. In 1976, Marcia Schvartz’s (1955) painting takes on color as a structural part of its figuration; it had previously moved within a lower intensity palette, dominated by blacks that later persisted in marginal figures who love one another without reservations. Color may be a vital response to destruction.
[...] Roberto Amigo