Painting (Painting)

Federico Herrero’s energetic paintings reflect his experiences on the streets of his native San José, Costa Rica, and in the surrounding tropical landscape. Rooted in Central American folklore, politics, and culture, his works often move beyond the canvas onto the wall or into the streets. In Á rbol y Pelicao (Tree and Pelican, 2009), a tree with cartoonlike creatures drawn in pen beside it emerges from a field of bright swaths of color.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Westminster Agua Viva is made from Westminster City Council(‘s) recycling bin bags, glued together, that the artist has painted and cut or cut and painted. Although, they hang on the wall they possess a strong sculptural quality as the fringes float away from the wall. This is part of a series of works that refer to Brazilian concrete and neo-concrete art as well as Arte Povera in a playful manner while demonstrating a strong identity of its own.

Photography (Photography)

In Hsu’s work, Colonia China (2014), the artist documents a Chinese cemetery of Costa Rica’s Limón Province, along the country’s Caribbean coast. Serving as the final resting place for Chinese migrants who came to Coast Rica during the late nineteenth century as indentured laborers working to construct the Transatlantic Railroad, the Colonia China speaks to a long but divided history. Hsu’s photographs of the burial ground also echo her interest in typography, with blocky black lettering and painted Chinese characters marking the cemetery as a space belonging to two different worlds.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Her work Al final del arcoiris (At the end of the rainbow, 2015) is a bundle of bills from Chile, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, arranged by color to form a tight spiraling rainbow held close with a rubber band. Here, Martinez uses these various currencies to gesture towards questions of capital and value, the accumulation of wealth, and regional economies. Beneath the surface of her playful visual propositions, Martinez asks us to consider not only the monetary costs of international goods, but also the real, human consequences of a global economic culture that privileges some and devastates others.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Hueso de culebra (Snake Bone) arises from the stories that the artist’s grandmother used to tell him as a child about her father’s medical and spiritual practices in the southern part of Costa Rica, close to the border with Panama. One of them revolved around a plant that had various uses, from healing poisonous snake bites to predicting the future. She said, for example, that if one came across this plant during a period of drought, it could mean trouble was coming.

Painting (Painting)

In her geometric paintings on wood panel, Madriz employs the Fibonacci numbers to illustrate, in simplified form, the pattern of natural plant growth—beginning from a single stem, and growing exponentially, rationally, and efficiently outward from there. Tinting the underlying wood but not covering it, Madriz’s delicate cubes seem to hover on the surface of the warm wood surfaces, drawing more attention to the grain and its own natural pattern. Always drawing the attention back to the natural world, Madriz’s multimedia works aim to reassert the natural, and our own links to it.

Installation (Installation)

Part of the exhibition PIÑA MATRIZ (2014) at Despacio Art, this untitled work by Carlos Fernández is a wood panel (formerly a section of a wooden table top) that bears the residue of insects interacting with fermented pineapple. The exhibition considered the production of pineapple monocultures and the agricultural monopolies for this product. Fernández used the exhibition space to portray alternative possibilities of diversified and ecologically sustainable production that could be mobilized in place of mass produced pineapple monocultures.

Photography (Photography)

Adrien Missika follows in the footsteps of the Brazilian landscape architect and artist Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994), a designer of gardens, parks and promenades who introduced modern landscape architecture to Brazil. Marx’s work is characterized by the use of native tropical vegetation as a structural element of design. He worked with Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa, the architects of Brazilia, and with them, the tropical plant became a motif in urban architecture.

Installation (Installation)

De sino à sina (From Bell to Fate) is a six-channel sound installation by Carla Zaccagnini exploring the relationship between modern Brazil and its colonial past. The sound installation is made from a recording of the bell at Capela de Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Homens Brancos, a Baroque-style chapel that is one of the first chapels in Ouro Preto (previously Vila Rica) in the region of Minas Gerais. The work references the execution of José da Silva Xavier (1746-1792), also known as “Tiradentes”.

Photography (Photography)

This photograph is part of the series titled “Iris Tingitana project” (2007) focusing on the disappearance of the iris. If Yto Barrada was initially interested in the architectural heritage of the city, today the core of her research focuses on risks around landscape and its heritage. The iris, found bordering the city, carries the name of the city, and is an emblem of Tangier.

Photography (Photography)

In this photographic series, Yto Barrada was interested in the logos of the buses that travel between North Africa and Europe. They become like abstract paintings that recall Modernist formal experimentation. They are somehow symptomatic of the circulation of goods and people that is made to sound so abstract.