Líneas de la Mano

12.05 – 03.07 / 2015
Sicardi Gallery, Houston

Sicardi Gallery is pleased to announce the group exhibition Líneas de la mano, opening Tuesday, May 12, with a reception from 6-8 pm. The exhibition features work by Esvin Alarcón Lam, Ricardo Alcaide, Darío Escobar, Gianfranco Foschino, Juan Fernando Herrán, Harold Mendez, Gabriel de la Mora, Ronny Quevedo, and Ana Maria Tavares.

Featuring artists from Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Venezuela, Líneas de la mano (lines of the hand, lifelines) takes as its premise the idea that geometries connect the quotidian moments of our daily lives. Indeed, a line connects two points, A and B, start and finish, end and beginning; lines are defined by this function of connection, even as they continue to move past the points they connect.

The artists in the exhibition use the languages and conceptual frameworks of modernism and abstraction to suggest poetic connections: between people, between historical referents, between political experiences, and between places. The line as connector becomes a way of skillfully addressing fraught histories, and of weaving a set of relationships. Líneas de la mano also considers the tactility of each object. The works exhibited 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.

The exhibition title playfully alludes to palmistry; the connection is meant to highlight the actions of the hand, implicit in the creation of the work. Astrologer, numerologist, clairvoyant, and palm-reader Cheiro (William John Warner, 1866-1936) writes, “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 a different context, it is a compelling statement about the artistic process.
About the Artists:
Esvin Alarcón Lam (b. 1988, Guatemala) uses precarious and discarded materials such as scrap metal to create geometric abstractions. The metal for the artist’s work Displacement No. 2, part of his Reconstruction Series, is collected from discarded buses. In Guatemala, the painted buses are an iconic part of urban and rural landscapes. These buses are imported from the U.S., where they had previous lives as school buses. For Alarcón Lam, the geometries reference human transportation across the U.S. border, while creating a dialogue with historical abstraction. Alarcón Lam’s work has been shown at The Americas Society in New York, where he was one of four finalists for a permanent commission at the Rockefeller Center in 2014. He has shown at the Centro Cultural de España in Guatemala City, and his work is included in the Sayago & Pardon Collection, Los Angeles, USA. He currently lives in Guatemala City, Guatemala. Alarcón Lam will be present at the opening reception and artist’s talk.

Ricardo Alcaide (b. 1967, Venezuela) looks to the overlap between modernist design and lived experience in the metropolis. For Alcaide, experience (as seen from the street) circumvents the elitism of the modernist project. He describes his primary preoccupations as being “the physical and psychological correspondences between individuals and temporary precarious architecture… [and] focused on the architectural solutions to social situations.” Working from photography, Alcaide looks to the structures of architecture to elicit observations about social exclusion. His work is included in numerous international collections: Sayago & Pardon, Los Angeles, USA; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima, Peru; Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK; Colección Fundación Cisneros, New York, USA; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas, Venezuela. Alcaide lives and works between São Paulo and Madrid. He will be present for the opening reception and artist’s talk.

Darío Escobar (b. 1971, Guatemala) pairs vernacular visual language—ranging from the beautifully painted truckbeds found throughout rural Guatemala to the pristine basketballs sold at sports stores—with the historical referents of Minimalism and Conceptual Art. The combination is at once unsettling and often humorous; Escobar uses the overlapping aesthetics to create a body of work that reflects on the lived experience of the object. For him, art history is a reflection of national and international dialogues, of everyday experience, and of Guatemala’s forms of local abstractions. Escobar’s work is included in numerous international collections: Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, USA; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, USA; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami, USA; Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zürich, Switzerland; Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, USA; La Fundación / Colección Jumex, Ecatepec, México; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Santiago de Chile (MAC); Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo (MADC), San José, Costa Rica; Museo del Barrio, New York, USA; Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno Carlos Mérida, Guatemala; The Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles, USA; Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, USA; Museum of Latin American Art (MoLAA), Long Beach, USA; The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, USA; The Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, USA; Sayago & Pardon, Los Angeles, USA; and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria, among others. Escobar is represented by Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York, NY; Nils Staerk Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark; and Galería 9.99, Guatemala City, Guatemala. He currently lives in Guatemala City, Guatemala.

Gianfranco Foschino (b. 1983, Chile) creates video installations that challenge notions of time and landscape. Creating films that represent stillness (and its inherent instability), Foschino allows space for contemplation in the very gradual, almost imperceptible changes that he documents. Commissioned by curators Pedro Alonso and Hugo Palmarola 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, built by a Soviet factory in Santiago. Although the factory was dismantled in the 1970s with the coup d’etat that removed Salvador Allende from the presidency, the apartments are still in use. Foschino’s video follows the undulating line of a white curtain, as it breaks the rigidity of the building’s strict geometry. Foschino’s work is included in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, USA and he has been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City, Mexico; Chilean Pavilion – Arsenale, 14th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Italy; Unsettled Landscapes, SITElines, 9th Santa Fe Biennial, Santa Fe, USA; and Ilusión Optica, Modern Art Museum, Mexico City, Mexico. Foschino is represented by Christopher Grimes Gallery in Santa Monica, California. He currently lives in Santiago de Chile.

Juan Fernando Herrán (b. 1963, Colombia) is internationally recognized for his work in photography and sculpture. His minimalist sculpture Progresión replicates the scale of stairs in different domestic settings; the poorer the home, the steeper the steps and the cheaper the wood. The work is an eloquent and simple statement about the relationship between our built environs, lived experience, and the construction of class systems. In 2014, Herrán won the Prix Pictect commission and his work was shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.  His work is included in numerous international collections, such as Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia; Patricia Cisneros Collection, Caracas, Venezuela and New York, USA; Fundación ARCO, Madrid, Spain; Jumex Collection, Mexico City, Mexico; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain. Herrán is represented by Galería Nueveochenta, Bogotá, Colombia. He currently lives in Bogotá, Colombia.

Harold Mendez (b. 1977, USA) is a graduate of the MFAH Core Program at The Glassell School in Houston. In his work, he bridges multiple media and formats to approach experiences of loss and disappearance, history and archives. Working out from the discipline of photography, Mendez uses nontraditional techniques and processes, to build up a surface that relates directly to the larger themes of his work. Mendez received his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and he has participated in residencies at Ox-bow; the Experimental Sound Studio; the Headlands Center for the Arts; the Lighthouse Works; and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Mendez’s work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum Harlem, New York; the Museum of Modern Art / PS1, New York; the Renaissance Society, Chicago; the Knoxville Museum of Art; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; among others. Reviews of his work have appeared in The New York Times, ArtForum, and Frieze Magazine. Mendez currently lives in Houston, USA.

Gabriel de la Mora (b. 1968, Mexico) collects detritus and ephemera ranging from hair to found photographs, shoe soles to painted ceilings. He transforms these objects, using meticulous craftsmanship to call attention to their original uses, while also making conceptual investigations into the nature of art. Much of de la Mora’s production focuses upon the intimate functions of objects that, outlasting their usefulness, have been discarded. By repurposing found things, de la Mora points to the actions of time upon the object. In his series of found radio covers, the geometries in the objects are created by the object’s use over years; as the radio played, the sound waves affected the imprint of dust and the bleaching of color from the fabric covers. De la Mora’s materials are weighted with mysteries from the past—their hidden narratives are central to the artist’s conceptual and formal interests. De la Mora received his MFA from Pratt Institute, New York. His works are collected by numerous public institutions, including: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, USA; Art Museum of the Americas, Organization of American States, Washington, D.C., USA; Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami, FL, USA; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY, USA; Fundación/Colección JUMEX, Mexico City, Mexico; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico; Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles, CA, USA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), Houston, TX, USA; Museum of Latin American Art (MoLAA), Long Beach, CA, USA; and Richard E. Peeler Art Center, De Pauw University, Greencastle, IN, USA; among many others. De la Mora currently lives in Mexico City. He has been represented by Sicardi Gallery since 2008.

Ronny Quevedo (b. 1981, Ecuador) is a graduate of the MFAH Core Program at The Glassell School in Houston. In his work, he often references the social constructions of community. As a child in New York, Quevedo’s family participated in weekly gatherings of the Ecuadorian and South American expatriate community; ball games became the central organizing factor of this community, which shared food and stories, histories and cultural references. In his drawings with contact paper, he abstracts the lines of the basketball courts. The resulting drawings indicate a sophisticated relationship to abstraction, with a firm grounding in social practice. Quevedo received his MFA from the Yale School of Art and BFA from The Cooper Union. He has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the Lower East Side Printshop, The Bronx Museum of the Arts and has exhibited at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Islip Art Museum, New York; El Museo del Barrio, New York; The Bronx River Art Center, New York; Saltworks Gallery, Atlanta; The Drawing Center, New York; and The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York. He currently lives in New York, USA.

Ana Maria Tavares (b. 1958, Brazil) looks to the legacies of modernist architecture in Brazil to create futuristic non-places, and meditations on institutions, systems, and information. With her On Contamination series, the indented and elevated bubbles on the surface of the tiles connect to the changes that appear on the surfaces of tiled buildings in the city of Fortaleza. 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. Tavares has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at Museu Vale, Espírito Santo, Brazil; Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, USA; Paço das Artes, São Paulo, Brazil; and Kröller-Müller Museum, Arnhem, Holland, among others. Her works are in the collections of:  FRAC Haute Normandie, Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain, France; Foundation ARCO, Madrid, Spain; Kröller-Müller Museum KMM, Arnhem, Holland; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói, Niterói, Brazil; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de São Paulo (MAC), São Paulo, Brazil; Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Museu de Arte de Brasília (MAB), Brasília, Brazil; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM), São Paulo, Brazil; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; among many others. She currently lives in São Paulo, Brazil. She has been represented by Sicardi Gallery since 2014.