The Beat Goes On
The Beat Goes On
By Joel Weinstein, Rotund World
If Julieta González has been steadily consolidating her vision of what she can do with the Berezdivin’s warehouse of miscellany, the folks at Galería Candela have a ways to go. You have to applaud Abdiel Segarra, the curator of the madcap series of exhibitions that Candela embarked on at the beginning of summer, at a killing pace of one show every two weeks. We spoke to Candela’s owner and collaborator in the art projects, Pablo Rodríguez, about our misgivings, and he pointed out that though the openings are a party and he manages to bring some collectors in during each show’s first few days, no one comes to the space for the duration of the exhibition. It’s an understandable dilemma, but one which tends to perpetuate itself. It appears to us that Rodríguez doesn’t really want to be in the business of selling art. Beyond the posters, pamphlets, t-shirts, and buttons which he and Segarra prepare for opening night, there is not much effort to establish the space’s identity: no set hours, no staff, no way, except for a very good web page, to know what’s going on between opening nights. Rodríguez believes he can turn the art he exhibits into product—those t-shirts, for example—and sell such chotchkies at art fairs to support the Candela project. Mainly, he says, the idea is to provide exhibition opportunities for young, unexposed artists, and to show the customarily easy-going island artworld how things really get done.
If you’ve always assumed that the point of making art is to sell the art while precisely not turning it into product, at least in terms of building a career, it’s important to know that although Rodríguez has a long-standing interest in visual art, he’s always been a maverick about it. Over the years he’s put on shows when he felt like it—for Dzine, Lee Quiñones, and Sofía, among others—and until now he’s been more interested in producing music. This goes a long way toward explaining the breakneck pace and the party favors at Galería Candela openings.
To date there have been four one- and two-person shows in the space since the beginning of summer: a drippy, fleshpot painting-installation exhibition by Roberto Márquez, a comix-inspired ceramic figure and codex extravaganza by Miguel Rivera, a show of paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures by the perpetrators of the web magazine Trance Líquido, Lilliam Nieves and Daniel A. Román, and a floor-to-ceiling painting, drawing, and video exhibition by two of the most interesting non-painters among the young and restless, Karlo Ibarra and Héctor Madera González. There was also one wide-ranging, conscientiously thought-out group show, BLOG, whose bold aim was, according to organizers Tito and Nani Fernández, to “reinterpret the narrative’s reality.” The atmosphere at the openings has varied from electric to humdrum and the art has always been more or less what we expected, but it’s been hard for us to determine if the cumulative effect of so much so quickly is, as Rodríguez hopes, to draw larger and ever more curious crowds to the fray. None of the artists has complained about the pace of things. On the contrary, everyone we talked to seems to think the idea is hunky-dory, and why would we ask?
Well, to begin with, looking at art is, for us, a meditative experience. What we want to see we want to return to, and the value of doing this quickly and with all the accouterments of a pop record release is somewhat lost on us. True, it’s been awhile since exhibitions at galleries meant anything significant for anyone but the artist, the artist’s friends and family, and the whole movable feast of opening-night revelers. Whatever art gets sold probably sells at what in some places are called preview nights, prior to the openings, or in the first frenzied hours of art fairs or through a dealer’s extra-curricular activities. So in a sense Rodríguez is correct to think of the shows at Candela as “auditions,” as he once put it, for fairs he might attend in the future or bigger shows he might put on elsewhere, especially when there’s a single artist involved who otherwise would have no show at all. But BLOG was a telling exception. It was a show with more or less intriguing works—we especially liked Kristine Serviá’s snapshots of shaped and measured nothingness, Miguel Ángel Torres Aponte’s too-tall-to-be-useful blackboard, and W&N’s riotous mapping of the homophobic inclinations of royalty—but its ambitions were what really set it apart. More than cash-bearing bodies coming through the door, BLOG needed some time to comprehend its reach, and more time to appreciate it.
As for what lessons these two-week shows impart, we would imagine that Candela Standard Time (CST por sus siglas en inglés) implies, to any young artist paying attention, that the increasingly frantic dynamic of making and exhibiting work, so driven in the real world by the strictly monetary imperatives of art fairs and other market forces, is the order of things beyond the art school studio door, a kind of natural law by which the formal and social concerns that were once essential elements of creative production are old school and outmoded; that creation’s no longer much the point at all. When Rodríguez waxes enthusiastic about making t-shirts out of some of the admittedly graphically spiffy paintings on the wall, he might just be saying that to watch the steam come out of our ears and our eyeballs rachet out of their sockets, but we believe he believes what he says. It’s a mantra that seems to us about 180 degrees off, but we’ve been wrong before.
In fact we like the project overall, it’s fun to be part of the artmob in a relatively new and—even if a little clockwork—bohemian setting, it’s smashing that Rodríguez and Segarra are providing young artists with shows, and sometimes the mood is transcendent. If the boys altered the script just slightly—a couple of extra weeks for exhibitions, hours for the gallery beyond opening night, however limited—they’d probably hear less Rotund grumbling.
The first image in the last section shows a detail of the Robert Márquez installation at Candela, Solito Show. The second image is from Miguel Rivera’s ¡Qué clase de héroe! Third down is from opening night at the Comuna exhibition, with work by Daniel A. Román in the background and Lilliam Nieves in front. Below that is one of Hector Madera González’s paintings from the most recent exhibition in the space, and the following are, on the left, Miguel Ángel Torres Aponte’s installation and, on the right, Jason Mena’s, from the group show BLOG. Also from BLOG, a detail of the work of José Tomas. The t-shirt worn by none other than Rafael Miranda is his own work, and may or may not be what Pablo Rodríguez has in mind. Whatever the case, we love it and want camisas all around.
Upcoming, as if all this blather was not enough, Rotund World would love to weigh in on Parto, the recent installation by Migdalia Barens-Vera at el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, and a new show at that evergreen little neck of the woods, La Liga del Arte, called, by our rough translation, Forgive Me, Mom, I’m a Printmaker. There’s little to forgive in this modest demonstration that the venerable Puerto Rican printmaking tradition is alive and very well, thank you. We also hope to check out the nifty Ada Bobonis installation for your delectation, at el Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. All in good time, folks.
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