All progressive art protests the dominance of what has gone before‎. Staged incidents and riveting imagery evoke pressures and tensions with the vividness of‎ dreams and nightmares in POWERS SEEN AND UNSEEN [Poderes visibles e invisibles]. This international selection of recent moving image art, curated by Washington-based guest curator of Global Visions, Kelly Gordon, that highlights an array of‎ distinctive artistic strategies. Each cultivates awareness of “forces,” visible, invisible, exterior and interior. The exhibition designer is Gaëlle Smits.

Italian born, US based artist Federico Solmi’s two part solo show COUNTERFEIT HEROES [La fachada de los héroes] opens August 7 at G17 at Centro de Arte Los Galpones, Caracas, and September 10, at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del Zulia (Maczul) in Maracaibo. His work will also be featured in POWERS SEEN AND UNSEEN, a group show opening this Fall at Hacienda La Trinidad Parque Cultural, Caracas. ‎ These exhibitions represent the debut of the artist’s works in Latin America.

During a recent studio visit, Federico Solmi grabbed an old-school kids’ coloring book depicting American landmarks from his source shelf and remarked: «What always fascinated me about these coloring books was that they took complicated historical events and represented them to popular culture as pleasant, polished line drawings». Sorting through an array of the artist’s | … |

El Helicoide, May 18, 2016. Luis Theis has been imprisoned inside the beast of concrete and rebars that sits on top of Roca Tarpeya, hoping to awaken from a modernity that never came. Torture, rapes, and disappearances sleep together in a place where drugs and prostitution have been guests already. This time, the monster temporarily houses, like a terrifying hotel, the detainees from the march held in Caracas in support of the recall referendum convened by the opposing Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD), which after a strong intervention from the Bolivarian National Police (PNB) and the appearance of the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN), resulted in 44 detainees nationwide (14 of them in Caracas).

Much criticism and analysis in every field unavoidably probes and seeks to “understand” on a personalized level, convinced that there must be rational motive, a ‘because’ to explain any act, be it terrorism, art or astrophysics.

Lamezuela, a sign that arises from and accounts for the malaise, the defect, and the ingrown spine of our time. A sign that has “become an iconic image of the moment we are living as a country”; an untimely sign that impacts and collides – with all its implications – with the cultural and historical perception of our time.

The fountainwoman, one of my archetypal female characters, is activated through presence in the art action La Vaguada [The Trough], because «we carry the rain deep inside.» She sings hymns from her guts and drowns in the water.   This action was born in 2005, when I found a news clipping in my archives about | … |

    The boot obeys orders. The boot wants to vanish the protests until they are prohibited. The licked boot is tamed from below. Which of the two parts is, then, subjugated?   The sentences of the previous paragraph seem to be the strange transcription of a mathematical formula because they are, like language itself, | … |