Tiger-poems and songs for hurricanes

Curated by Andrés González

This exhibition is about the possibility of new realisms. Or maybe it’s about the failure of realism and the inception of a new way of using painting as a representational tool. Well, it’s not actually “new”. But it has been revisited- reshaped-reframed. I don’t think this is an aesthetic style, but rather a mindset. And what this exhibition deals with is the distance between the mindset and the representation of this self-imposed “perspective” within the pictorial realm. The contemporary world is hard to look at, even more difficult to comprehend! Reality seems to be constituted of an acidic liquid that burns our hands when we try to grasp it and see through the transparencies and brief glimmers. Violent & fluid ambiguity.

Henri Rousseau was harshly criticized by the French press during his first exhibitions, his painting style was called pre-primitive. The pre-primitive realm is populated by children, animals and non-western cultures. If this so called pre- primitivism allows us to shake the foundations of our epistemological pride, then this “perspective” is a valuable one, that should be re-activated constantly in times of visual overconfidence.

Innocence and naiveté are powerful tools that can respond to the cartoonish usage of theory and criticism nowadays. A subtle demand for a new rigor, new perspectives on intimacy, and a plea for a more humble notion of humanity (trying to deflate the rationalistic pride of modernity, irremediably present to in art- making in recent years).