Essay: Líneas de la mano
Ricardo Alcaide, Settlements, 2015.
Líneas de la mano
Sicardi Gallery, Houston, TX, USA
May 12 - July 3, 2015
Exhibition brochure available for download here.
When a line connects two points, it also continues on infinitely.
Think of your life as having a starting point and a stopping point. The matter, the content, between those points is what we most often speak about. But that line also continues, beyond those points. It crosses them, expands past them, connects to other points, and bisects other lines. It starts long before the first point.
Imagine the moments when the matter of your life intersects with that of another person. That point of connection demarcates the crossing of two lines, joining the stuff between your start and end point with that between theirs. Our lives, thought in terms of lines, become radiating star shapes, splaying out infinitely in many directions, linking us to others, near and far.
If line connects our multiple points, life is the thing that bends and stretches the line, redirects it, and forces it to change direction. There is nothing neat and orderly about the quotidian matter of our days.
Settlements, Progression, Displacement, Contamination, and Disorder: geometry and rationality are the language with which these artists question the precepts behind geometry and rationality. Nothing is as straight as its lines might suggest.
Progresión, a sculpture by Juan Fernando Herrán, anchors Líneas de la mano. Each wooden piece references the staircases in someone’s home. The quality of the different woods and the steepness of the stairs indicate the relative wealth of the home: the steeper the stairs and cheaper the wood, the poorer the home. A deep stair is a sign of wealth, and the luxury of available space. The work is an eloquent and simple statement about the relationship between our built environs, lived experiences, and the construction of class systems. A line can speak truth to economic and social disparities. A series of photographs by Herrán, titled The Hurricane, suggests the outlines of a ghost. When it was built in 2000, this wooden roller coaster was touted as the largest in Florida; it was closed in 2011. Herrán explores the object’s monumentality and the architecture of entertainment, with its emphasis on vertigo, excess, and adrenaline. Herrán’s haunting night photographs create an aura of film-like fiction around the abandoned structure.
Beginning with photographs of iconic Modernist architecture in Brazil, Ricardo Alcaide layers his surfaces with painted geometric shapes. These objects break the lines of the buildings they cover, substituting them with new geometries that are characterized by a brushy, painted surface. In Rational Disorder (Palácio da Justiça, Brasilia) and Glass House Disrupted (both 2015), disorder and disruption counter the rigidity of the iconic structures in the photographs. The tension between the paint and the crispness of the photograph beneath it is both a visual and social point. For Alcaide, lived experience (as seen from the street level) circumvents the inherent elitism of the Modernist project. The point is driven home by his sculpture, Settlements, No. 9, also included in the exhibition. He references precarious architecture to think through “architectural solutions to social situations,” challenging the social history hidden behind the lines of modernism. Ana Maria Tavares also looks to the legacies of Modernist architecture in Brazil to question the construction of institutions, systems, and information. With her On Contamination series, the indented and elevated bubbles on the surface of the metal tiles reference changes that appear on the surfaces of tiled buildings in the city of Fortaleza. As the tiles are destroyed by the climate, they are replaced by similar (but slightly different) tiles; the result is a corrupted façade, with slight variations in color, pattern, and texture. For Tavares, the relationship between nature and design suggests the permeability of modernism. Within its fissures, she notices the many other ideas, peoples, and histories that are also eliminated from the modernist project.
Gianfranco Foschino creates video installations that challenge notions of time and landscape. In films that represent stillness (and its inherent instability), Foschino allows space for contemplation in the very gradual, almost imperceptible changes that he documents. Commissioned for the Chilean pavilion of the 14th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, KPD #2 (2014) is a silent, 7-minute video focused upon the façade of a Chilean housing complex. Prefabricated concrete panels like those used to build this apartment building were designed and exported worldwide by the Soviet Union. After the coup d’etat that replaced Salvador Allende with a conservative dictatorship, the country’s relationship to the USSR was dissolved, and the factory was closed. The buildings, however, remain in use today, a relic of the Cold War era. In KPD #2 (one of a series of four videos), the undulating line of a white curtain breaks the rigidity of the building’s strict linearity.
Darío Escobar pairs vernacular visual language—elicited from the beautifully painted truckbeds found across Guatemala to the pristine basketballs sold at sports stores—with the historical referents of minimalism and conceptual art. For Escobar, the potential life of an object abuts the cleanliness of the aesthetic. Juego a cinco manos (Five-handed game), for example, is a study of line-making, told through the elegant joining of pool cues into an exploding abstraction. Obverse & Reverse XX is a delicately suspended cloud, made from soccer balls turned inside out. The trailing threads hint at rain, while making visible the construction of the ball. The hand is in play here.
Ball games and their role in making community are at the heart of Ronny Quevedo’s works on paper. Using contact paper and graphite, Quevedo’s drawings abstract the lines of the basketball courts he remembers from childhood. Raised in New York, Quevedo and his family participated in weekly gatherings of the Ecuadorian and South American expatriate community; ball games became the central organizing factor of the community. These weekend gatherings became sites for sharing food and stories, histories and cultural references. The resulting drawings indicate a sophisticated relationship to abstraction, with a firm foothold in social practice and personal history.
In his newest body of work, Gabriel de la Mora collects fabric radio covers. Each bears a unique trace of its past life: circles and squares appear on the fabric after years of use. As the radio was played, the sound waves affected the imprint of dust and the bleaching of color from the fabric. De la Mora’s materials are weighted with the past—their hidden narratives are central to the artist’s conceptual and formal interests.
The object’s past is an important aspect of Esvin Alarcón Lam’s work, in which he uses precarious and discarded materials such as scrap metal to create geometric abstractions. The metal for Displacement No. 5 is collected from discarded buses; in Guatemala, the painted buses (retired U.S. school buses) are an iconic part of urban and rural landscapes. For Alarcón Lam, the geometries reference human transportation across the U.S. border, while creating a dialogue with the conventions of artistic abstraction.
Working out from the discipline of photography, Harold Mendez builds up a surface from soot, spray enamel, watercolor, graphite, and litho crayon. In the two works shown here, Event Horizon, and Busto de Gaitán Destruido, Mendez uses archival photographs he found in Medellín, Colombia, as his source imagery. In one image, photographs plaster the walls behind a photo enlarger in a dark room. The photographs are arranged in rows, evidence of the work done in the space. But paired with Event Horizon, in which a broken bust of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (1903– 1948) lies on the ground, the image is weighted with the responsibilities of history. One of the most charismatic politicians in Colombia’s history, Gaitán was a presidential candidate before being assassinated in 1948. His assassination marked the beginning of the Bogotazo in Colombia, and launched a period of violence that continued for more than a decade.
The artists in Líneas de la mano are linked in a kind of constellatory arrangement: there is no single through-line that connects them. Instead, several share a critical relationship to modernism and its architecture (Alcaide, Foschino, Tavares). They connect to some of the others through their relationship to materials and tactility (Alarcón Lam, Alcaide, Escobar, Herrán, Mendez, de la Mora, Quevedo). The histories of objects, as understood through archives and collections, suggest another arrangement of lines between several artists (Alarcón Lam, de la Mora, Mendez). And a constellation emerges between the artists whose work reflects social interactions and experiences (Alarcón Lam, Escobar, Herrán, Quevedo). All of them are marked by varying relationships to how a line might connect things, illuminate space, or bear a relationship to histories.
Suggestively, line unites many other disciplines and media: these lines of text, the structure of sculpture, melody, built environment, landscape construction. The list continues. A list is also a line. In dialogue with Líneas de la mano, Houston-based choreographer and dancer Laura Gutierrez will perform in the gallery, in the midst of the exhibition. The exhibition posits ways of thinking about line as it illuminates life; the dance proposes further modes of envisioning and embodying line. To draw and to dance, both share a relationship to line and to materiality. Both share a tactility—the touch—of body to paper, of body in space, of line as it evinces the body’s specific gestures.
Líneas de la mano playfully alludes to palmistry; the connection highlights the actions of the hand, implicit in the creation of the works. The images and objects here demonstrate a strong relationship to materials and their histories, from the scrap metal of Guatemalan buses, to the thick, sooty texture of an archival photograph transferred to aluminum, to the fabric retrieved from vintage radio speakers.
From the lines of the hand, we ask the palm reader to extrapolate meaning from the past and interpret the future. Among other things, the palmistry metaphor allows us to break from the bodies of knowledge often used by curators and art historians to discuss abstraction and geometry. Astrologer, numerologist, clairvoyant, and palm-reader William John Warner (1866–1936) studied palmistry in India before returning to Europe and becoming a celebrity palm-reader. He told the fortunes of celebrities including Mata Hari, Mark Twain, Sarah Bernhardt, and Oscar Wilde, and in the process, cemented the discipline as a popular practice in the Western world. In his 1894 book, Cheiro’s Language of the Hand, he writes (under the pseudonym Cheiro, short for cheiromancy) “the hand… denotes the change going on in the brain, even years before the action of the individual becomes the result of such a change.” Read in another context, it is a compelling statement about the artistic process.
—Laura August