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16/3/2007

3 Perspectives

Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation - CIFO, Miami

Eugenio Espinoza / Alvaro Oyarzún / José Alejandro Restrepo

3 Perspectives: CIFO 2007 Commissions Program Artists showcases newly-commissioned work by the three artists from Latin America selected through CIFO’s 2007 Commission Program: conceptual artist & painter Eugenio Espinoza (Venezuela); painter Alvaro Oyarzún (Chile); and video artist José Alejandro Restrepo (Colombia).

The exhibition, featuring new work by each artist alongside selections of their previous work, will be on view from March 17 to May 6, 2007 at the CIFO Art Space. The exhibition is curated in house by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill CIFO’s Chief curator and Laura Lavernia, CIFO’s assistant curator. Three curators have been invited to lead public talks with the artists and to write essays on the artists: Cuauhtemoc Medina (Mexico) on Restrepo, Cecilia Brunson (Chile) on Oyarzún, and Ruth Auerbach (Venezuela) on Espinoza.

Miami-based Venezuelan artist Eugenio Espinoza is the recipient of the 2007 CIFO Achievement Commission, a special honor recognizing the significant contributions of an artist from Latin America that have an extensive career track by providing them with broader exposure. “The Achievement Commission is especially significant, as it offers an international platform for artists with an important trajectory—an exchange that enriches both artist and audience alike,” noted Fajardo-Hill.

Espinoza will present a series of painted canvases—each using the grid structure that has become a signature element of his work—creating mounted structures that oscillate between sculpture, installation and painting. This series is a response to Espinoza’s 30-year conceptual oeuvre that has expanded and challenged the rigidity of the modernist grid, while also using it as artistic language. The canvases will be presented alongside historic photographs, artist sketchbooks and a new installation, Negativa Moderna, a direct response to his 1972 work, Impenetrable-an installation of a grid on canvas covering the floor of the exhibition space thereby denying public access.

Installation artist Alvaro Oyarzún of Chile will present a new project entitled, La imagen pintada o los más bellos recuerdos de la vida del Capitán Zanahoria (The Painted Image or the Most Beautiful Memories of the Life of Captain Carrot). This large-scale piece, encompassing an entire gallery wall, is composed of some 500 small-scale drawings, paintings and photographs. Oyarzún refers to his work as a visual montage of various intertwined stories where the characters—amorphous archetypes of artists—carry out one plot. In The Painted Image, these characters question the existence of art and the relationship between art and the artist. The piece also explores the relationship between painting and the contemporary image through photographic documentation and the multiplicity (and inherent irony) of Oyarzún’s humorous drawings as both didactic and illustrative tools.

José Alejandro Restrepo, considered one of the pioneer video artists in his native Colombia, will produce the newly-commissioned video installation Protomárties, a contemporary interpretation of the santoral, or calendar of the lives of saints. Restrepo will present Protomárties along with a selection of works—a video/sculpture and three video pieces—all which, through the use of new media, re-contextualize religious iconography and myth. The dramatic, baroque visual expressions of Christianity in Latin America are a key influence in Restrepo’s work, offering “a rich laboratory from which to develop a repertoire of figures and bodies that can be re-interpreted within a contemporary context.”

Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation
1018 North Miami Avenue - Miami
Hours: Thursday through Sunday, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.

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