Descripción del Premio
Faena Art Center Buenos Aires is pleased to present Tropos, a solo exhibition by 2015 Faena Prize for the Arts winner Cayetano Ferrer.
Faena Prize for the Arts is a biennial international juried prize, which recognizes artistic experimentation, encourages post-disciplinary and temporal exploration, and promotes inquiry of the infinite links among art, technology, and design. Cayetano Ferrer’s winning proposal engages with the concept of time and duration and was selected by an international jury that included Sonia Becce (Independent Curator, Argentina); Caroline Bourgeois (Curator, Pinault Foundation); Rita Gonzalez (Curator, LACMA), and Katie Sonnenborn (co-Director, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture). Tropos opens to the public from February 10 through February 26, 2017.
Ferrer’s installation involves the use of borrowed architectural forms, structures and surface ornaments that reference various historical époques. The palimpsest of visual identities contained within urban art and architecture is acknowledged along with the ephemeral nature of these forms that seem to slip away as they are fabricated, destroyed and refabricated to occupy new forms.
The exhibition, curated by Jesús Fuenmayor, is an investigation that explores the architectural fictions that can be traced in the industrial and decorative arts of cities world-wide and in particular the artist’s home base of Los Angeles and the exhbiition’s context in Buenos Aires, including Faena Art Center’s previous life, as an old flour mill. Ferrer’s project creates a factory like environment for the production of gelatin molds, an energetic, time-based and ever-changing situation within the Faena Art Center that is never fully realized but is rather in a continuous state of becoming.
The opening of the exhibition is entirely different than its final days after the accumulation of the organic and mechanical processes have followed their course. The darkened space is eerily illuminated by the sculptural elements (known as melting units) that give off heat and light, which affect the processing of these gelatin molds. Nearby styrene and plaster casts are reminiscent of a classically decorated carved reliefs, hand-crafted objects and industrial artifacts that reference a multitude of symbols, linguistic particles from antiquity to the present day—iconography that exists within the urban landscape but are repurposed here within the formal confines of the art viewing space. The location is manipulated by the artist to become a factory for the processing of the past, and ultimately a depository for the ornamentation of a new visual language
Jesús Fuenmayor commented on Ferrer’s project and the implications of the work, “Cayetano Ferrer’s work explores how one deals with the past in daily life through the use of symbols that activate memory’s subjective territory. Departing from the classic tradition’s use of architectural decoration as a means to tell visual stories, Ferrer’s installation for the Faena Art Center emphasizes the ambiguity of such mnemonic symbols, subjecting them to a process of decomposition and re- composition that allows for the viewers to project their own memories and desires onto the work. Ferrer transforms the conventions of sculptural molding into a contemporary sculpture in reverse that debases its materiality. In doing so, he constructs a counter-visuality that affirms impurity, temporality, and movement and at once promotes a vividly entropic and unique experience of sculpture.”
This exhibition can be visited from February 10 to 26, 2017
Wednesday to Sunday from 12:00pm to 7:00pm
Free admission. Closed on Mondays and Tuesdays
Faena Art Center Buenos Aires
Aimé Painé 1169, Faena Buenos Aires, Argentina
About Cayetano Ferrer
Cayetano Ferrer (b. 1981) lives and works in Los Angeles. Engaging with iconic and site-specific architecture Ferrer’s work repurposes these structures to create new digital and visual languages that reference familiar forms while creating augmented realities and experiences. His most recent exhibitions include the solo show Composite Arcade at Château Shatto, Los Angeles (2014); and the group exhibitions St. Petersburg Paradox at the Swiss Institute (2014); Downtown Light and Sound, Human Resources, Los Angeles (2013); Culm, Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2013); and Made in LA, organized by the Hammer Museum and Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in 2012. He received the 2013 Artadia award from the Los Angeles Award California Community Foundation and a 2010 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship.
About Jesús Fuenmayor
Jesús Fuenmayor is a curator with more than 25 years of experience in the field. In 2015 he curated the exhibition Eugenio Espinoza: Unruly Supports (1970-1980) at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, as well as Gego: Autobiography of a Line at the Dominique Lévy Gallery in New York in 2016. From 2012 to 2015 he was Director and Curator of the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in Miami. Before that, from 2004 to 2011, he served as Director of the Fundación Periférico Caracas, also curating exhibitions on contemporary artists including Antoni Muntadas, Meyer Vaisman, Arocha + Schraenen, Jorge Pedro Núñez, Montserrat Soto, Jaime Gili, and Danilo Dueñas. He has organized curatorial workshops and seminars and published extensively in international art magazines as well as museum catalogs and anthologies of contemporary art.
Exposición. 15 oct de 2024 - 16 feb de 2025 / Museo Nacional del Prado / Madrid, España
Formación. El 25 oct de 2024 / Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) / Madrid, España
