Without Seasons (2010)

For many contemporary art thinkers, the upheaval of the visual system began with the undermining of the values ​​of bourgeois mimetic form. Portraiture, landscape, and still life—the historical trilogy of Western art—would relinquish their aesthetic hegemony in the face of the transformation of reality as both the stage and driving force of the socio-historical imaginary. Thus, it is worth recalling that the avant-garde artists of the first quarter of the 20th century, for example, reduced the graphic-pictorial elements of academic origin—paradoxically celebrated culturally and economically—to mere means of subjective expression, a development that ultimately led to the irrevocable alteration of representation.

No less significant was the advent of photography and the consequent devaluation of the artistic image—that is, the pictorial—in the last fifty years of the 19th industrial century. It is possible, then, to think that today's art, even more revolutionary, challenges the dominant and reductive aesthetic of globalized society, countering it with a whole formal repertoire that draws both on historical memory and on the logic of the contemporary situation. Today, any artist in the world knows that making art involves seeking the formal not as a mere representation of reality, but as a response to and translation of its complexity; a matter that clearly exposes the elements and scope of terms such as history, memory, domination, subordination, center, periphery, difference, identity, biodiversity...

Finally, this exhibition makes it clear that in contemporary art all media are significant insofar as they make the intention – concept – transparent in an emotional form – expressive material.