NYAB Event - Eduardo Bárcenas "Glocal Proposal I, Acts of Silence"

Eduardo Bárcenas "Glocal Proposal I, Acts of Silence"

Elga Wimmer PCC

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SOLAR announces that owner/director, Esperanza León, is organizing two solo exhibitions to be presented at Elga Wimmer PCC, New York City.

Glocal Proposals bring together artists able to identify sensitively with global as well as local influences and circumstances in their artwork. Their capacity to bridge the poles creates a new mode of expression: glocal. Many, if not most, people nowadays live glocal lives led by globalizing factors like air travel, mobile phones, the Internet. It is the artist’s ability to be authentic to his local social and cultural expression while identifying himself, and being identified with, a global arts representation that is key to a successful work of art.

Acts of Silence constitutes Glocal Proposal I and will begin on 13 January 2009, presenting a selection of works by Venezuelan artist, Eduardo Bárcenas. This is Bárcenas’ first solo show in New York City. Benjamin Genocchio wrote in The New York Times about the artist’s 2006 show at SOLAR in East Hampton, “Mr. Bárcenas takes as his theme social and political events in Latin America, though without grandstanding or being too obvious about it. His works are vague and dreamlike, aiming to evoke feelings of loss, tragedy and despair.” The current selection includes paintings and works on paper as well as wire and mixed media box constructions dating between 2000 and present. Bárcenas exposes issues of identity and existence through masks and visages, including self-portrait: “the faces fill you with a sense of overwhelming sadness, even despair, at the thought of such physical pain and suffering”. These emotions and circumstances are veiled and silenced visually and figuratively by the artist’s use of white paint to erase and fragment the forms, or wraps or shrouds that muffle the faces. Genocchio concludes, “To me this is the best kind of social and political art, inviting us to mull the issues it raises rather than telling us what to think”. Bárcenas has exhibited extensively in Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and the United States. He has been invited twice to exhibit at the Havana Biennial and has won a number of prizes and recognitions for his work, most recently the significant “Alexis Perez Mujica” award in Venezuela.