Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck will be part of the group exhibition Figuraciones modernas en recurrencia (Modern Figurations in Recurrence), which include works in various media by local and international artists. The exhibition will open to the public this coming Saturday, November 7 at Hacienda La Trinidad Parque Cultural.
In Figuraciones modernas en recurrencia the participating artists are: Ricardo Alcaide (Caracas, 1967), Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck (Caracas, 1972), Juan Iribarren (Caracas, 1956), Pepe López (Caracas, 1966), Esmelyn Miranda (Caracas, 1977), Jorge Pedro Núñez (Caracas, 1976) and Gerardo Rosales (Caracas, 1967).
In the Venezuelan visual arts, modernity is installed mainly in a consistent abstract-geometric tradition that breaks out as a promise of growth and wealth, of "development." This abstract-geometric tradition has become, for many contemporary artists, a kind of horizon that not only circumscribes and demarcates the myth of a modern Venezuela anointed by oil, but also intertwines it with various operations and power strategies. A horizon to which many contemporary visual works allude - and go - with a critical and reflective gaze in an attempt to understand the unfolding of continuities, discontinuities and paradoxes that constitute contemporary Venezuelan history, or in an attempt to reflect on the "circumstances" that have made possible the current cultural and political drifts of the years of revolution. Or perhaps in an attempt to explore the shadows - the aspects that are hidden - behind the modernizing project.
In this exhibition, this horizon of "artistic and cultural modernity" is re-interpreted from the perspective and actions of seven artists whose own visual strategies and particular exercises of semantic appropriation are related to this tradition by reflecting, re-thematizing and re-inscribing critically its postulates, its formal aspirations and its formulas of re-presentation, contaminating it with different elements of a contextual order. Indeed, each one elaborates, from their own perspectives, works in which artistic modernity is cited and surpassed, exceeded in plots of unpredictable and unexpected meanings, and reconfigured in the encounter with the operations and requirements of our time.