NYAB Event - Santiago Villanueva “First Impressions”

Santiago Villanueva “First Impressions”

Y Gallery (319 Grand St.)

This event has ended.

Y Gallery presents the first solo exhibition of Santiago Villanueva in the gallery. Villanueva exhibits a series of recent works that reflect his continuing revision of Argentinian art history.

In the mid-nineteenth century in Argentina, the pictorial genre of “Mesa Revuelta” (disorderly table) was extended. This genre is considered a late derivation from the still life. The present exhibition shows the results of the artist investigation during 2013, 2014 and 2015 in the form of “mesas revueltas”, which combines the aforementioned pictorial genre with a personal atlas of the artist made of images of the argentinian art history. On a pictorial surface a series of papers, threads, letters and documents are featured from a frontal view, eliminating the usual perspective of still life.

Using all kind of images, from those of massive circulation in the medias to the works of specific artists such as Estanislao Guzmán Loza, Villanueva proposes a new methodology for the understanding of art history opposed to the traditional linearity of its approaches, by employing a random superposition of paintings, diaries, books, objects, etc…

The installation Primeras Impresiones composed by 6 images and mounted on a burlap structure is based on an event that took place on the starting moments of Argentinian education and its related to a group of people who travelled to the United States during the XX Century. In 1845 Domingo Faustino Sarmiento[1] traveled to North America with funds from the Chilean Government in order to study its current educative system and developed it in South America. In this trip Sarmiento got obsessed not only with the educational system but also with the American life-style which he considered orderly and methodical. As a result of this experience, which is narrated in details by Sarmiento in his diary, the teacher Mary Gorman travels to Argentina to work as the first schoolteacher implementing the educative system of the United States. This travel has further influences in Sarmiento’s presidential term initiating a tradition of travelers and diaries along the XX Century.

Santiago Villanueva (Azul, Argentina, 1990). Lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 2010 he was a scholarship holder at the CIA (Artistic Investigation Center of Buenos Aires). In 2011 he was selected to participate in the eighth edition of the ArteBA Petrobras Award for visual arts with the project Adquisicion. In 2013, he received a scholarship of the Cisneros Fontanals Foundation (CIFO) to make a project named Geografía Plástica Argentina. In 2013 and 2014 he was part of two major conferences in the program of 89plus, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist & Simon Castets: “89plus Colony Conference” at Moma PS1 and “ Marathon of the Americas” at the JUMEX Museum in Mexico D.F. He has featured exhibitions at the Nuevo Museo Energía de Arte Contemporáneo, Parque de la Memoria (Monumento a las Víctimas del Terrorismo de Estado); Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; Consulado General de Argentina en Nueva York; Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (MAMBA); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Latinoamericano (MACLA); Musée d’ Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. He is in charge of the educative area of the Nuevo Museo Energía de Arte Contemporáneo, and he was the curator of the program Bellos Jueves at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires. He is the editor of the magazine Tradición and Mancilla.

[1] Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811 –1888) was an Argentinian activist, intellectual, writer, statesman and the seventh President of Argentina. His writing spanned a wide range of genres and topics, from journalism to autobiography, to political philosophy and history. He was a member of a group of intellectuals, known as theGeneration of 1836, who had a great influence on nineteenth-century Argentina. He was particularly concerned with educational issues and was also an important influence on the region’s literature.

Media

• Painting

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