PopMatters
July 08 - August 27, 2016

Catalogue Essay by Raisa Clavijo.
 
Opening Night: Friday, July 15, 7:00PM
 
Canale Diaz Art Center is pleased to present "PopMatters", an exhibition that displays the recent works of five Latin-American artists that make the fundamentals of the ‘50s & ‘60s Pop Art their own to enrich the current visual arts language. They not only corroborate today’s Pop Art validity, but they also show the extraordinary communicational strength of the movement in the pop culture of this millennium.
 
Amid the whirlwind of color and seduction, the show begins its journey with Cuban Ahmed Gomez and his Pin Up girls, with his seductive aesthetics of the female image, taking us to the beginning of the Pop Art movement, a period that generated an indelible mark in the advertising world of the post-war era. In his works, Gomez astutely combines images from the past with foreign elements: lines and strokes that suddenly approach us to abstraction. In sum, it certainly leaves an imprint that lingers until nowadays.
 
These interesting coalescences also fuel the works of Venezuelan Alejandro Plaza, who weaves with astonishing naïveté surreal and abstract-geometric elements while maintaining his core essence as a contemporary pop artist. Plaza not only renews the meaning of transparency and overlapping geometric planes, but he also shares with kindness the optimistic vision of his inner world.
 
"PopMatters" presents, as a guest artist, Puerto Rican Antonio Cortes Rolon with his latest series “An actor at the White House.” In this series, Cortes Rolon exemplifies the use of power through fruitful alliances in two separate spheres such as Politics and Showbiz in modern and contemporary America. With his monochromatic works, the artist hints at the influence and complementarity that these alliances provoke among the masses of voters and followers, in an era such as ours, where social media continues to exert a vertiginous influence in society’s development.
 
In this group show, we also present Venezuelan Andres Celis, with whom we resume the appreciation of craftsmanship presented in a past exhibit (Alternative Abstractions – Ludic Geometries), this time around inspired by Pop Art. His sculptures, meticulously carved, are not only reminiscent of craftsmanship, but also benefit from a flawless finish achieved through techniques as modern as distant to the art world.
 
"PopMatters" is also an invitation for Venezuelan Raul Cardozo, who uses an iconic biblical scene like “The Last Supper” to showcase how important icons from today’s society, characterized by the rule of values such as beauty, fame and greed, are intertwined together. Nonetheless, Cardozo uses this series to take the viewer, both silent and simultaneously, through a profound, but humorous critique of consumer society and globalization.
 
Finally, we invite you to enjoy the exuberant works of these five Latin-American artists. We hope you will be as delighted as we are in bringing together a group show that seems fresh in appearance, without avoiding the piercing thoughts and expressions of contemporary Pop Art.