Painting Situations: Sigfredo Chacón and Liliana Porter / ISLAA Artist Initiative

Painting Situations: Sigfredo Chacón and Liliana Porter/ISLAA Artist Initiative curated by Jesús Fuenmayor and Kaira M. Cabañas and taking place in the Gary R. Libby University Gallery, is the first exhibition in the ISLAA Artist Seminar Initiative / UF series.

The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) designed its Artist Seminar Initiative to support academic institutions in fostering intimate exchanges between students and living artists from Latin America. For this first iteration at University Galleries, the work of renowned artists Sigfredo Chacón and Liliana Porter informed the two-semester program of a curatorial seminar followed by an exhibition. Students in art history and museum studies took part in the seminar led by Jesús Fuenmayor in Spring 2022 and also serve as members of the curatorial advisory committee to the exhibition.

Painting Situations: Sigfredo Chacón and Liliana Porter showcases the work of two pioneers of Latin American conceptualism. The curators chose to focus on Chacón’s and Porter’s most emblematic projects: his Pinturasparlantes (Speaking-paintings) and her Forced Labor series. In doing so, the exhibition highlights how, despite each artist’s deployment of radically different aesthetic strategies, the works on view share a common ambition. Each artist’s work critically comments on painting as a medium and as a situation that calls upon viewers’ lived experiences and attention to social contexts. Chacón’s practice focuses on dismantling painting’s modernist programs by inscribing language within its visual field as they attempt an unmediated communication with their audience, while Porter turns to the invisible labor of painting and how gender and class intersect beyond its traditional frame.

Painting Situations is complemented by a second exhibition Más Situaciones: Sigfredo Chacón and Liliana Porter (parts I and II), which is curated by doctoral candidates Helena Chen and Laura Colkitt in the Gary R. Libby Focus Gallery as part of the series “On View: Curatorial Studies.” For the exhibition at the Focus Gallery, Porter will present her video Actualidades. The stochastic film incorporates nonlinear vignettes of miniature figurines engaged in unexpected or surprising situations. Analogously arranged like a newspaper, the video’s segments display expressive scenarios--from tender to farcical--evoking a range of human experiences. Chacón will present a selection of the works related to his 1972 installation
Situaciones [Situations], a series of pieces that he recently reconstructed for his solo exhibition in a private foundation in Miami. Treating painting as objects, the installation explores the situational aesthetic and references military forces as well as organized oppression in Venezuela.

A fully-illustrated catalogue with contributions by the curators and interviews with the artists will be published by University Galleries.

The exhibition program and publication are sponsored by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art and the School of Art + Art History, University of Florida, Gainesville. Additional event sponsors include the Harn Eminent Scholar Chair in Art History and the UF Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment).

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