Jump Cuts: Venezuelan Contemporary Art, Colección Mercantil
June 1 - July 15, 2007
Dislocated Continuities
This selection of important works by contemporary Venezuelan artists in the Colección Mercantil, executed between 1990 and 2006, is focused on the most significant modernization processes in the history of Venezuela. In this country, the assimilation of modernity and the different interpretations given to it in the 20th century are characterized by moments of crisis, some of which have been selected by this curatorial proposal and associated with a series of outstanding figures of Venezuelan art. The critical assimilation of contingencies represented by these works is characterized in four nuclei, which are in turn related to four historical moments: the idealization of modernity belongs with the nucleus titled The Modern Vernacular; the synchronization of local and international modern developments is embodied in the nucleus From the
Object to the Mode of Representation; Art Thought is the nucleus in which one examines the leveling of social development and artistic development; and the ideals of social transformation are explored within a nucleus synthesized as Necrophilia. Jump Cuts, the title of this exhibition, is a term associated with Jean-Luc Godard's filmmaking techniques, designating cuts from one shot to the next that cause ellipses in the action and produce a dislocation of spatial axes and a discordance between image and sound. Taken as a title, this term reflects that the universe of works comprising this exhibition is inserted into a constructed historical flow, intersected in turn by continuous interruptions or dislocations. The curatorial order proposed here is based on the existence of different connections with the environment that provide ways to approach this particular set of artworks in light of the art that preceded it.
