Eugenio Espinoza+Andrés Michelena (Tandem Exhibition) Curated by Roc Laseca, Centro Cultural Español, Miami, FL, USA
REMEMBERING / PROVIDING / RESISTING is a tandem project by Eugenio Espinoza (Venezuela, 1950) and Andrés Michelena (Venezuela, 1963) presented at the Spanish Cultural Center in Miami (CCEM) from April 11, 2013 until May 17, 2013.
The project is supervised by Canary curator and semiotician Roc Laseca, PhD in Art Theory, and counts with the collaboration of CIFO - The Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, which has generously granted part of its collection for the exhibit.
The project includes the site-specific by Eugenio Espinoza ('The Exhibitionist', 2013) and by Andrés Michelena ('Countervision', 2013) as well as a documentary film that is produced in collaboration with Arevalo Gallery - whose premiere took place on the night of April 11 in the projection room of the CCEM.
REMEMBERING / PROVIDING / RESISTING is an exercise of correspondence between these two Venezuelan authors on the viral, critical and political behavior of experimentating with the legacy of drawing and painting abstraction. Through its radical mise-en-scène, the project seeks to reconnect the ways in which the experiment of drawing and painting abstraction constitutes a subversion of the modernist canon.
Historiographically, peripheral art practices seem to have been assigned the contextualization of those developments in art theory being proposed from the 'hegemonic centers of visuality' (Nelly Richard, N. Garcia-Cancilini, dixit). Yet there is a vindication of their socio-political implications, typical of a human economy that does not ignore the productive, relational practices of specific contexts on which it operates. Romantic and emancipatory modernity autism is gone, along with the areas of knowledge that barely tie their socio-political consequences.
Does it mean that the modern exercice was reduced into a will to separate discourses from humans, language from the Earth, and build efficient emancipatory veils that seemed to distinguish and put in order the different world spheres when, de facto, human network is interconnected, inextricable, and common? Will the crisis of modernity end up into a failure of its visual regims, through the ways it used to produce revolutionary myths and, mainly, areas of emancipation where those myths could take place?
Thinking about it –experiencing it- means remembering, providing, resisting.
Roc Laseca.