Galeria Leme has the pleasure to present the exhibition Visiones Contemporáneas Venezolanas (Contemporary Venezuelan Visions), a group show with works by Christian Vinck, Daniel Medina and Luis Arroyo. These artists has as commonplace the rereading of Venezuelan art history from the contemporary, as they resort to certain visual, conceptual and ideological references that refer to the plastic Venezuelan imaginary.
Christian Vinck is a self-taught artist that currently dedicates entirely to painting. The artist is characterized by being an image collector and creator of works that portray and reinterpret documents and themes inspired by an infinite variety of visual stimulus. The three series of works selected for the exhibition shows some of these impulses.
In the series Armitano, based on a group of books by Ernesto Armitano (important Italian cultural editor), Vinck portrays in an almost monochromatic way the cover of these books, developing a peculiar iconography from literary memory. In the same way, from Russian Toys (Juguetes Russos), an article published by Walter Benjamin that theorizes on the popular Russian art and the childish vision of world as a collective figuration, the artist paints fragments of the essay and of the images that are part of it, reflecting on the contemplation and the toy as artesian object. In the work Laminario Portátil de Mapas Tropicales, Vinck presents a selection of paintings on maps of the Pacific and Caribbean coasts that, portrayed in a cartoonish way, constitute a kind of geographic chart made for children.
Daniel Medina brings to this exhibition a project entitled Solución Habitacional. The work is composed by a series of modules that when put together become apartment structures, similar to the ones used in the dwelling solutions by Le Corbusier. The artist constructs these modules based on the alteration of the mountable model of the Louvre Museum’s frontal façade, disarticulating the systems of representation and propagation of European socio-cultural models inherited by Latin America, specifically in the 1950’s.
Luis Arroyo has been developing his artistic practice around concepts as anteriority and exteriority of elements as the sonorous, the history, the document and the archive, the ideologies, the painting, the disease, the war, amongst others. These interests are understood as starting points for the creation of works that are in essence residues or traces of something that cannot be done or said.
Espectros is a set of twelve book covers – empty and enlarged – that alludes to the spectral character of fundamental ideological systems in the development of 20th century’s history.
In the body of works Micrografias and Restauración del Aura, from the series Libros Exhumados, Arroyo creates compositions variations from the graphic signs used by Walter Benjamin in his manuscripts, at the same time, they allude to the abstract and geometric Latin-American painting.
Arroyo, through restructuring different kinds of archives, approaches Latin-American art, as Vinck reconfigures, through painting, historical and artistic documents, and Medina disarticulates the architectural representation systems. In this way, the creators generate aspects in common that refer to the socio-political and cultural context in Venezuela and the rest of the continent.