Los Carpinteros Coverage - Edouard Malingue Gallery

Edouard Malingue Gallery
馬 凌 畫 廊
Sixth floor, 33 Des Voeux
Road Central, Hong Kong
edouardmalingue.com
Los Carpinteros Coverage
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April 2016
Wallpaper
“Cuba rising:
Los Carpinteros
political
views inairMexico
Slenske,
Michael.
“Cuba rising:airLos
Carpinteros
politicalCity”
views in Mexico City,” Wallpaper, April
Link: http://www.wallpaper.com/art/los-carpinteros-airs-political-views-in-mexico-city
2016.
The renowned art collective Los Carpinteros are the subject of a new solo exhibition at Mexico City's
Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC)
‘I don't know how, but when we moved out of Cuba we started thinking more about Cuba,’ says
Dagoberto Rodríguez of Los Carpinteros, the renowned art collective he operates with his fellow
Cuban-born, Madrid-based collaborator Marco Castillo. ‘People move out of Cuba to forget about Cuba
but we moved out to think about it more.’
This obsessive nostalgia is on full display through September in the group’s new exhibition at Mexico
City's Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC). ‘They are mostly political reflections,’ says
Rodríguez.
The work – comprising drawings, sculptures, and installations — spans the last decade, beginning with
Faro Tumbado, a 25 foot-long sculptural replica (with the same timed flashes) of a felled lighthouse that
stood in the entrance of Havana Harbor. The piece, which the duo completed in Cuba in 2006, is now
in the collection of the Tate Modern.
‘It's very funny, we did this in 2006, but this year Fidel Castro fell on his knee and that was the
beginning of his retirement from politics,’ says Rodríguez. ‘The lighthouse was kind of a premonition.
The revolution used this phallic image to remind you of the power of its ideas, so we wanted to show it
on its side, but still lit.’
It lies in opposition to Candela, an LED-lit ‘revolutionary fire’ that invokes the illuminated reliefs of Che
Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos in Havana's Plaza de la Revolución. In addition to these installations
are two star-studded works – Movimiento de liberación nacional, a series of star-shaped charcoal
barbecues; and 17m, a 17-metre-long clothing rod that holds some 200 black suits shot through with a
star-shaped hole – and a reproduction of the 2013 installation Tomates, which is comprised of walls
bombarded with tomatoes then fitted with porcelain sculptures of the politically-charged fruit. Outside,
they have installed 40 contorted human-scaled iron nails for their Clavos Torcidos, which mimics the
bodies (or ‘the beauty of the waste’) at the battlefield of Gettysburg.
‘The whole show looks very tough,’ says Rodríguez, acknowledging that curator Gonzalo Ortega, who
originally conceived the exhibition for Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, identified a ‘poetic
activism’ that tied all the works together. ‘But it's not so obvious, we are more focused in the language
of the pieces.’
That language comes to life in the video from their controversial Conga Irreversible performance during
the 2012 Havana Biennial. The work saw the duo enlist 100 performers and musicians to enact and
play the traditional carnival procession known as comparsa – from Havana’s famous Paseo del Prado
to the Malecón – in reverse: an impossible taunt to an intractable regime. Little could they know then
that four years later President Obama would be projecting a way forward for their country by touring
these same streets with Raul Castro.
5 December 2015
The Art Newspaper
“Los Carpinteros commissioned for Faena Forum”
Link: http://theartnewspaper.com/reports/art-basel-miami-beach-2015/los-carpinterosPobric, Pac. “Los Carpinteros commissioned for Faena Forum,” The Art Newspaper, December 5,
commissioned-for-faena-forum/
2015.
A rendering of Faena Forum Image courtesy of Faena/OMA
The Rem Koolhaas-designed Faena Forum in Miami, which is due to open in autumn 2016 as the US
home for the international arts foundation started by the Miami-based Argentine real estate developer
Alan Faena, has announced its inaugural commissions. They include Conga Irreversible by the Cuban
collective Los Carpinteros, which was originally produced for the Havana Biennial in 2012 and which
will be “reimagined in the context of Miami”, according to a release. Other forthcoming projects include
Tree of Codes, a collaboration between the artist Olafur Eliasson, the music producer Jamie xx and the
choreographer Wayne McGregor.
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30 July 2015
Blouin Art Info
“V&A to Reopen Europe 1600 - 1815 With Los Carpinteros ‘Globe’”
Link: http://www.skny.com/attachment/en/56d5695ecfaf342a038b4568/Press/56d56998cfaf342
Forrest,
Nicholas. “V&A to Reopen Europe 1600-1815 With Los Carpinteros “Globe,”’ Blouin ArtInfo, July 30, 2015.
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Victoria & Albert Museum, London
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) has announced that it will reopen its Europe 1600-1815 galleries on
December 9, 2015 following the transformation of seven galleries as part of the V&A’s ongoing £12.5m “Future Plan”
redevelopment program.
According to the V&A, the seven galleries will house the Museum’s unrivalled collection of 17th- and 18th-century
European art and design, continuing the story of art and design that begins in the award-winning Medieval &
Renaissance Galleries which opened in 2009.
Highlights of the galleries will include a large, highly ornate Rococo writing cabinet made for Augustus III, a grand 18thcentury bed from the Parisian workshop of George Jacob, a 17th-century Venetian table by Lucio de Lucci, and the
painting “The Château de Juvisy” by Pierre-Denis Martin.
Martin Roth, V&A Director, said: “These new galleries are a major development in our ambitious program to renew the
architecture of the V&A for the 21st century and, at the same time, re-examine and re-present our collection for our
visitors.
“At a time when roles and relationships within Europe and the world are under scrutiny, it is interesting to explore the
objects, makers and patrons of a period that was so influential upon the habits and lifestyle of Europe today.”
To mark the opening of the new galleries, the V&A has commissioned the artist collective Los Carpinteros to create a
devising a large-scale, imaginative, and thought-provoking contemporary installation that would sit within the gallery
examining the Enlightenment.
Titled “The Globe,” the installation is a curved architectural sculpture made from a lattice of engineered beech that will
form a “room within a room” at the heart of the new Europe displays, offering visitors an opportunity to pause and
reflect as well as engage with the concept of Englightenment.
Los Carpinteros said: “Our commission for the V&A is the culmination of a 20-year fascination with the idea of the
‘panopticon.’ First devised in the 18th century by Jeremy Bentham, these structures promoted surveillance and control
and were originally intended for prisons.
“The Globe reinterprets this format as an observation point midway through the Museum’s new galleries. It is a station
for rest, contemplation and discussion that will relate closely to the objects that surround it.”
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29 March 2015
The Guardian
“Los Carpinteros; Christina Mackie: The Filters - review
Cumming, Laura. “Los Carpinteros; Christina Mackie: The Filters – review,” The Guardian, March 29,
2015.
‘Juice turns to blood’: Tomatoes, 2013 by Los Carpinteros. Photograph: Jason Wyche; courtesy of Sean
Kelly Gallery, New York and Ivorypress, Madrid © Los Carpinteros
The suits stretch away into the distance, 200 black jackets, dark ties and white shirts massed on a rack –
a funeral march of identical men, timeless and hollow. They could be generic bureaucrats. But shot
through the whole assembly from one end to the other is a gaping five-point hole in the chest. You can
see right through these identical men. Each has a Cuban star for a heart.
It is a formidable piece of visual theatre, macabre and yet comic, its politics beautifully agile. For when
you peer into the dark heart of officialdom – the state, the Cuban Communist party, the body politic, the
secret police, however you choose to interpret it – you still see a bright shining star, a hopeful light at the
end of the tunnel.
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Robotica, 2013 (wood, metal, Lego) by Los Carpinteros. Photograph: Jason Wyche; courtesy of Sean
Kelly Gallery, New York © Los Carpinteros
The two men who made this piece, Marco Antonio Castillo Valdés (b1971) and Dagoberto Rodríguez
Sánchez (b1969), collectively known as Los Carpinteros, are among Cuba’s best-known artists. Their
work is in public museums across Europe and America. More to the point, their subtly satirical sculptures
are also on display in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in the centre of Havana, which is where they
are principally based. Unlike many Cuban artists before them, Los Carpinteros are not living in exile.
Acute wit and exquisite craftsmanship characterise everything they make. At the Parasol Unit, in their first
big London show, the two artists have filled one gallery full of fervently burning flames conjured out of
cheap bulbs and fretworked driftwood (not for nothing are they called the Carpenters). The combination
ought to be going up in smoke, but this is a fire that no one can put out.
In another gallery they have built a soaring replica of a triumphant Soviet monument out of Lego – an
anti-memorial to a historic moment worked up in bathetic children’s bricks.
Western sentimentality towards Cuba is gleefully mocked. Here is Manuel Copado’s much-loved Solimar
apartment building, a beacon of 1940s modernism, reprised as a heavy black acoustic box streaming the
sounds of the real Cuban tenants who live there, their voices so often ignored. On the floor nearby, a set
of conga drums appears to have melted into rigid white pools. Cuba – land of dance, sizzling hot and yet
frozen in time. All three tourist cliches skewered at once.
Over the years, Los Carpinteros have created a fantastical world of utopian models. In the upper galleries
you can see the brown-brick island of Urbanización floating on nothing but thin air, and the great glass
Croissant that doubles as a preposterous pastry of a prison. Rusting cast-iron sputniks, octagons and
star-shaped stadiums evoke the real communist structures that stand empty and ruined in Cuba today.
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Cuarteto Rebelde, 2012. Photograph: Private collection; courtesy of Ivorypress, Madrid © Los Carpinteros
And delicate watercolours, the size of billboards, show a landscape of half-built concrete pylons receding
into the distance – a forest of dreams – and a skyscape of floating trams. Each is passing through space,
empty of passengers, on its way to absolutely nowhere.
Los Carpinteros have a gift for collapsing (or suspending) time, their pieces often referring as much to the
distant past as the present or future. The walls of the Parasol Unit, for instance, look as if they’ve been
pelted with rotten tomatoes by a mob of medieval villagers, gobbets of red pith sticking to the surface,
scarlet juice spattering and staining the pristine whiteness. But there is a brilliant gleam to these
tomatoes, which turn out to be cast – captured – in porcelain.
So the carnival protest freezes into something more permanent and sinister. Juice turns to blood. The
overtones of political suppression, of civil wars and firing squads are impossible to ignore.
The most pungent work in the show, though, turns out to be a foray into film. In Conga Irreversible, a cast
of dancers dressed in black and white dance their way straight down Havana’s Paseo del Prado –
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backwards. An excitable crowd tails them in forward motion; so you are already looking at something
quite hard to follow – a frantic performance against the grain. As the dancing gets wilder, the film itself
turns carnivalesque – cutting from bird’s-eye view to street level and gutter, peering into a trumpet’s horn,
staring up skirts, whirling through the crowd, all the time trying to keep up with the backward-flowing
rumba and cha-cha-cha. Whipping faster and faster, the dance – and the film – become almost
impossible to follow, spiralling into confusion and madness. The music moves forwards, the dancers
move backwards: how will it all end? The work dramatises Cuban politics with dazzling speed and
panache.
Christina Mackie’s The Filters at Tate Britain. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
Los Carpinteros would make a terrific show for the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain, but alas those days
are long gone; the museum must fill its marble canyons with nothing but homegrown talent each season.
And anyone might think this pretty thin on the ground to judge from Christina Mackie’s current display, an
assembly of wan thoughts in the form of half-hearted objects that won’t detain you for more than a
moment.
Silk nets dangle from the ceiling, flaccid and stained pink, mauve and yellow like gigantic used condoms.
Beneath each is a pan, something like a large dog bowl, full of semi-crystallised dye. Perhaps the nets
have leached the colour from the pans? But no, they don’t touch the liquid. The sense of blank and
pointless disconnection is only aggravated by a second object, an assembly of industrial tubes and filters
that might be doing something with some coloured pigment – except that it isn’t.
Some chunks of coloured glass, like gigantic sweets, are all that remain of this disastrously dull and
underpowered exhibition, described as a meditation on colour. If she has any thoughts on this subject, or
any other, Mackie is once again keeping them entirely to herself.
• Los Carpinteros are at the Parasol Unit, London N1 until 24 May
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17 October 2013
South China Morning Post
“Arts preview: Los Carpinteros turn confusion into an art form”
Link: http://www.scmp.com/magazines/48hrs/article/1329480/arts-preview-los-carpinteros-turnconfusion-art-form
Arts preview: Los Carpinteros turn confusion into an art
form
ArtsLeepreview:
Edmund
Los Carpinteros turn confusion into an art form
Edmund Lee
Marco Antonio Castillo Valdés (left) and Dagoberto Rodriguez Sánchez, with their work Octogonal (2013).
Photo: May Tse
WE RECOMMEND
LOS CARPINTEROS: HETEROTOPIAS
Edouard Malingue Gallery
You're not alone: the duo behind Cuban-born, primarily Madrid-based collective Los Carpinteros are just as
confused about the delirious blend of art, design and architecture in their sometimes functional and often
playful body of work as everyone else.
"The functionality of the things we make is fascinating, because we're totally confused about it," says
Dagoberto Rodríguez Sánchez, who formed Los Carpinteros in 1991 with Marco Antonio Castillo Valdés, and
Alexandre Jesus Arrechea Zambrano, who left the group in 2003. "Sometimes we don't know the nature of the
things that we produce. We have the intuition to make the logical [decisions], but we don't know the
consequences."
The duo are presenting two recent lines of work at their first solo exhibition in Asia: large-scale watercolour
drawings that depict chaotic, imaginary structures built with Lego blocks, and prototype sculptures of "reading
room" architecture, which the artists derived from philosopher Michel Foucault's idea of the panopticon prison,
before subverting its surveillance principle, and adapting it for library building purposes.
Both series explore the idea of space, and have a long history in Los Carpinteros' oeuvre. Sánchez jokes that
the selection of the drawings stems from the fact that "we're in the mood of Lego". It is a theme that aptly
corresponds to the duo's fascination with construction materials, such as bricks and cinder blocks.
"These scenarios have been made to make you feel small. We want to give the feeling of isolation that
happens in the human life today," says Sánchez.
Valdés says: "[The drawings] give you a sensation of multiplicity. They are, in a certain way, a question about
the development of a construction: the idea of China becoming a crazy, almost maniacally constructive
country. We reflect on this inhuman aspect with these drawings. It's almost like an illness of construction."
Sánchez and Valdés maintain that they're happy to trade the concept of individual authorship for collaborative
practice. "People think visual art is something you make in a closed room, with almost no light, but that is not
the reality," says Sánchez.
"Visual art needs people; it needs to be communicated and spread. It's one of the most social practices in the
world. Nobody works 100 per cent alone."
Says Valdés: "And there's always the influence of your partner, your critic, or maybe your assistant."
"Or your mum," says Sánchez.
Edouard Malingue Gallery, 1/F, 8 Queen's Road Central, Monday-Saturday, 10am-7pm. Ends November 23.
Inquiries: 2810 0317
Issue #5 2013
FLATT magazine
“Los Carpinteros: Building a New Vision”
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Laster, Paul. “Los Carpinteros: Building a New Vision,” FLATT magazine, Issue #5, 2013.
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June 2013
ARTnews
“Seeing Double:
DreamGeorge.
logic, impossible
combinations,
and visual
fill the work of Cuban sculpture duo Los Carpinteros”
Stolz,
“Seeing Double,”
ARTnews,
Junepuns
2013.
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9 June 2010
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New York Times
“100 Acres to Roam, No Restrictions”
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/arts/design/13park.html?_r=0
Sheets, Hilarie M. “100 Acres to Roam, No Restrictions,” New York Times, June 9, 2010.
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Ms. Freiman is behind the interactive ethos of the park, which will be free and open around the clock,
as well as its mission of giving less-established artists, in addition to well-known ones, the opportunity
to experiment. Type A, for instance — the New York team of Adam Ames and Andrew Bordwin, whose
work explores the nature of competition and collaboration — has suspended two giant aluminum rings
horizontally, one above the other at heights of 12 and 25 feet, from trees and former telephone poles,
so that the rings’ shadows will align perfectly during the summer solstice. It is a meditation on the way
relationships move in and out of sync that was inspired by two years of team-building exercises Type A
conducted with the museum’s staff.
Tea Makipaa, a Finnish-born artist living in Germany, has placed an almost 50-foot-long ship called the
“Eden II” out on the lake. In the lakeside shack nearby, visitors can call up sound and video about the
supposed passengers, refugees from an ecological disaster. While the lifespan of the installations will
vary, the museum’s director, Maxwell Anderson, anticipates the water-related pieces will succumb to
the elements faster.
“We can imagine leaving Tea’s piece to become a shipwreck,” Mr. Anderson said. “Why not just let it do
what it needs to do?”
LOS CARPINTEROS A fantastical basketball court fuses this two-man collective's interest in
surrealistic architecture and Indiana's love of the sport.
The full-size court with two hoops is filled with a maze of bright red and blue arches - as high as 19 feet
and as wide as 51 feet - that represents the imagined trajectory of a bouncing ball changing possession
between two teams. Perhaps not coincidentally, the palette also brings to mind Indiana's history of
shifting between Republican and Democratic allegiances.
"It's an endless game, with all the connotations you can take from that situation," said Dagoberto
Rodríguez Sánchez, one-half of this collective from Havana. "With every bounce the geography of the
game changes."
His collaborator, Marco Antonio Castillo Valdés, added, "No one wins."
But all can play.
The artists imagine the court will be a paradise for skaters and those interested in extreme sports. "This
place can be used for anything except basketball," Mr. Rodríguez Sánchez said with a laugh.
Mr. Castillo Valdés said, "It would have to be creative basketball."
ANDREA ZITTEL As part of her series of experimental living structures that examine what is really
necessary in daily life, this California artist has created an inhabitable floating island in the shape of an
igloo and installed it in the lake.
It is intended to be used and customized by a series of residents; the first, who will live in it through the
summer, are Jessica Dunn and Mike Runge, students at the Herron School of Art and Design in
Indianapolis. They have built a bicycle generator for energy, planted a garden in self-watering
containers that bob in the lake and created an onshore note-writing station where visitors can write
messages that will be floated to the students in small igloo-shaped vessels.
When a flag is flying on the island, park visitors can ring a bell onshore, and Ms. Dunn and Mr. Runge
will pick them up in a rowboat for a tour of the island. All guests are being encouraged to take an object
from the igloo and leave another in exchange. "Our possessions will be more fluid than we're used to
having them," Mr. Runge said. Ms. Dunn added: "Andrea Zittel is handing this island over to us to
interpret into our art piece. In return we want to let the public make its mark as well."
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JEPPE HEIN In "Bench Around the Lake" Mr. Hein's bright yellow benches take fanciful swoops and
turns before appearing to tunnel down into the ground and emerge again dozens of feet away, near (or
in a few cases far from) the lake's edge.
"Once you start to experience them sequentially, you'll feel that connection between them," he said.
Over the last decade, this Danish-born artist has explored the social and political dimensions of placing
his benches in public spaces. Here he was interested in baiting visitors to walk around the lake in
search of the next one, and in fostering interaction at the different resting spots.
"They are a tool for communication, and create a kind of social playroom," Mr. Hein said.
All 15 benches are functional, though some are more roller coaster or slide than stable platform, putting
guests in close proximity to friends or strangers. The one that Mr. Hein refers to as "kissing bench" is
small and dips in the middle. "When two people are sitting on it," he said, "they slide in together, wanted
or not."
ALFREDO JAAR This Chilean-born artist based in New York is known for his meditative architectural
spaces and has built a large square within a square in the park’s woodlands using stacked gabion
baskets filled with limestone rocks and sprouting grass. The only way to penetrate the eight-foot-high
outer wall is through a dark tunnel with a beacon of natural light at the far end.
“There will be a lot of trepidation and suspense because people don’t know what will be at the end,” Mr.
Jaar said.
Visitors will emerge into a grassy minimalist cube garden with wooden benches that form a square in
the center and a wall of trees lining the perimeter of gabion baskets.
“My work has dealt with a lot of tragedies around the world, and I was looking for a space of
lamentation, of healing,” said Mr. Jaar, who views the more than two million stones in the gabion
baskets both as a symbol of man-made destruction and a source of refuge.
They also dampen exterior noise. “I wanted to offer a place to be with yourself, to be with someone
else, to be without distractions,” he said.
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