{ visionarios }

“What today is called a work of art is a degraded understanding of a magical object.”

Claes Oldenburg

instituto de visión’s { ᴠɪsɪᴏɴᴀʀɪᴏs } program begins its story with a tribute to women in art via the selection of a retrospective of Alicia Barney’s (Cali, 1952) work. In the seventies, this pioneer of the visual arts in Colombia took a great step towards unexplored practices in Colombia, such as land art or ecological art.

Barney’s work is profoundly ritual and, in turn, makes aggressive but silent screams of protest. It is subtle to the extent that her poetry, though tough and cynical, is intimate, feminine and calm. Her practice is silent because art, despite various utopian attempts and efforts, has failed to change society. This tension lies beneath Barney’s work, an artist who at a young age began to lose faith in contemporary society.

Ever since the seventies her work has shown an interest in significant themes, somewhat metaphysical, in which society’s essential problems are questioned, such as the destruction of the environment and nature, overpopulation and hunger. But beyond this critical discourse against politics and aggressive forms of consumption, prevalent among youngsters at the time, Barney’s pieces reveal her unique character.

Maintaining a critical and daring position, Barney generates her work through rituals and creative processes that depart from spiritual and intuitive horizons to enable mystical connections with art. Her works on the impact of industry on nature represent a precursor in the country, not only in artistic terms, but also environmentally speaking. Her work has been identified as bio-avant-garde. Río Cauca (1981- 82) — in which water was collected at different points along the river in order to show the varying degrees of contamination — is, for instance, a sublime artistic piece as well as a scientific document of political complaint.

Another field of study for Barney is the passing of time and daily life. From an early age she developed an interest in the Inca calendars and many of her pieces, such as the iconic Yumbo (1980), emphasize periodicity. Her series Diario objecto (1977 and 1979) is based on tours through streets or mountains during which the artist collected leaves, objects and waste materials, all of which are fragments of everyday life and with which she maps her own existence.

The stratification of Basurero utópico (1985) emerges from the esthetic principles of minimalism, in the sense of the repetition of the same geometric element. However, the purist aesthetic of this artistic movement is perverted in a social and political sense. Ten acrylic tubes have been filled with the elements of geological stratification and their tops filled with garbage, charcoal and sand. This way of sealing with garbage allows for decomposition and in 5 years the land can be reused.

Despite having been described as eccentric for her use of concepts such as biodegradable, Barney has maintained an active stance regarding the relationship between art and nature.

Maria Wills Londoño

How does memory materialize itself? In an object, a place or a street? And what happens when this object disappears? How is our mind able to recall? Time carries everything away, feelings, thoughts, spaces… yet they appear again, twisted by our mind and our emotions. In this exhibition, architecture, ornament and furniture are presented as ruins and structures that propose reflections about a remote time that no longer exists.

The notion of preservation that is evidenced by certain conservationist policies is useful in some cases, such as for monuments, but what happens with these intimate places, the importance of which resides in personal histories?

Daily life becomes ephemeral, as the minutes go by and are ultimately obliterated. The street that once was, the coffee shop down the corner that is now closed, the building where we grew up that has now vanished… We can feel alienated in our very own environment, exiled in a territory that has suddenly or gradually changed. Building from emptiness, parts of our stories lack solid foundations. Indeed, this might be why memory generates vertigo.

Lo que el tiempo se llevó proposes a reflection on memory understood through architectural space using the works of Fernell Franco (1942-2006), who was part of the generation that consolidated the city of Cali as a protagonist in the creative wave of the seventies.

Through languages as diverse as installation, photography and video, this exhibition proposes tensions among the works of various artists from different generations.

The series Interiors, produced by Fernell Franco during the seventies, comprises much more than testimonies about daily life in the tenancies and homes of the city of Cali, presenting us with sublime paintings in light and shadow. Franco, one of the most important photographers of Colombia, captured in a unique manner the transcendence that an image’s extreme contrast in light and dark might have. In an interview with Maria Iovino, Franco affirms that contrast is not only a result of Cali’s meteorological conditions, where the midday light is incandescent and blinding, but also that it is a means by which to express the social contrasts observed in this city of accelerated growth.

Franco explored Cali together with Oscar Muñoz, Eduardo Carvajal, Ever Astudillo and Luis Ospina, for whom he carried out the still photography for various documentaries. From the beginning of the seventies, a deeply investigated urbanity of the city was one of the main themes of the Cali group. Fernell Franco registered disappearing spaces: beautiful buildings that would be destroyed to give rise to concrete blocks. “The violence against architecture and heritage was similar to that endured by men”, declared the photographer when speaking of this period of Cali’s history.

In these pieces, the artist captures recurring designs and ornamentations in villas (shared houses used as collective housing, inherited from the Andalusian-Arab culture), which show elements of neo-classical architecture. Moreover, Franco’s practice involves a process that turns these photographs into unique pieces; he intervenes them with inks and colors, just as in the Pictorialist images or romantic studio photographs of the nineteenth century.

María Wills Londoño

Part of instituto de visión’s { ᴠɪsɪᴏɴᴀʀɪᴏs } program, Calentamientos presents works by Miguel Ángel Cárdenas (1934), a Colombian artist and pioneer in electronic media, performance and installation. Cárdenas’ practice raised bold issues for the sixties, such as sexuality, eroticism, moral paradigms and Colombian cultural models versus their European equivalents.

In this exhibition a selection of works are presented that deal with the concept of human warmth as understood in terms of its most naïve and innocent of connotations (the idea of been able to transform a rationalist and cold culture, such as that of the Dutch, with a tropical temperament), as well as in terms of its most perverted of sexual connotations. Cárdenas, who confirmed his homosexuality when he arrived to Europe in 1962, always tried to escape moralist postures such as those that existed in Colombia at the time.

With his early abstract paintings, Miguel Ángel Cárdenas entered institutional collections and achieved recognition in the local art scene. Yet his creativity was contained. Reading Jean Genet opened up others realities and mores, stimulating him to create performances and video art.

Beyond the academy, his training has led him to understand that daily life is an essential part of the artistic experience. For this reason, one of the rooms of the exhibition recreates a living room inspired by those intervened by Cárdenas in his Calentamientos happenings, in which he made conversation with, generated laughs from, and warmed up Dutch families.

This series of happenings was recorded and now forms part of the collection of videos of Cárdenas’ production company Warming up etc. etc. etc., whose logo, a flower/vagina is reproduced on wallpaper in the exhibition space.

Michel Cárdenas, a name that Miguel Ángel adopted in the Netherlands to avoid the catholic references of his name, read Bertrand Russell to find that it both echoed and confirmed his rejection of a suffocating and discriminating religion opposed to the ethics of freedom. The opinions of the mathematician-philosopher regarding religion and particularly Christianity, in particular his writings about the cruelty of dogmas rooted in society and the necessity of having a posture closer to reason and truth, became the artist’s bible.

For these reasons, Russell’s liberal views on sexuality and marriage seduced Cárdenas. Sexuality in its most eroticized and explicit sense is a fundamental theme in Cárdenas’ practice. Fluids, orgasms and wails can be understood as ”abject”, yet from Cárdenas’ perspective they will never be vulgar since the sexual act is sacred and beautiful.

Words like “fuck”, “cunt”, or “dick” form the parts of pieces such as Aren’t those parts of a beautiful act? through which Miguel Ángel tried to reveal the sublime aspect of sexual relations, both heterosexual and homosexual. His refreshing posture, both literal and conceptual, fitted perfectly within the queer aesthetic since it had the right dose of activism in a dominantly heterosexual society. Cárdenas understood warmth as the spirit of life and therefore created diverse pieces about warming up: Un cube se transforme en cercle par la chaleur de Cardena, Cárdena Rechauffe le soleil, Cardena Rechauffe la Bible and the photographic montage Cárdenas Rechauffe la bouche.

The piece Somos libres is a surreal and symbolic narrative of his migrations in search of a space that allowed him to emancipate his body and his existence.

His Tensages, made with PVC and other recycled elements, arose from his desire to work from the aesthetic of consumerism and, as thus, can be understood as pop art. First made in 1964, they are pioneer pieces that melt pop with sexual themes. Moreover, they can also be seen as the continuation of Cárdenas’ abstract painting practice.

Some of these works formed part of the seminal exhibition New Realists and Pop Art, which travelled from The Hague to Vienna and Brussels in 1964.

María Wills Londoño