The coconut is not a concept, it is life; the grid represents the opposite. This tension is a constant preoccupation in my work.

Eugenio Espinoza (MoMA: Off the Grid: A Conversation with Eugenio Espinoza)

Eugenio Espinoza (Venezuela, 1950) is a major artist of Latin American art, the author of one of the most sophisticated and sarcastic strategies of aesthetic resistance to the overwhelming and technological presence of the Latin American modernising project, developed during the 1950s and characterised by defining Kineticism and Geometric Abstraction as the triumphal arts of oil-producing Venezuela.

His aesthetic logic could be summarised in one intention: “Tropicalise the grid”, a way of operating where tropical chaos (called in this exhibition “La razón del coco”) appropriates the rationality and aesthetic autonomy of geometric abstraction, proposing to rethink the pictorial plane, its container and the relationship with space. The result is a sarcastic, rural abstraction, corrupted by tropical precariousness and Caribbean humour. Taking the form of flaccid grids that tremble, collapse, make coconuts levitate or simply block the viewer’s passage into the room, like the mythical “Impenetrable” from 1972 (Tate Collection). An iconic work of contemporary Latin American art, it revealed the disconnection between this utopian and civilising ideal of participatory art and the reality of rural life in Venezuela in the 1970s, satirising the values of interactivity, universality and spirituality.

Drawings

The selection also includes small-scale works on canvas and a new group of unpublished projects in which the artist projects fragile and ephemeral architectures based on the photographic records of his historical installations. An exciting conceptual process where his recent ideas parasite and resize the memory generating a work that is configured in three times: physical work, document and this kind of fictions from the memory.