Installations, Still and Moving images
October 18-22, 2023

Jose Alejandro Restrepo et María Teresa Hincapié
by Rolf Art

The Artist

Jose Alejandro Restrepo (b. 1959) is a central figure in Latin American contemporary art, with more than thirty years of production within the historical panorama of electronic arts in our continent. His training and interests are varied and range from the visual and performing arts, installation, photography, performance and editorial production, establishing himself as a model of contemporary artist who operates from hybridity. His work is based on serious research on the speeches of the dominant power and popular beliefs that derive in a critical vision and whose interpretations dismantle the ideology of the system. The recovery of the theatricality of Catholicism and the codes of the colonial baroque by the political / media and the slide towards politics of some of the most important religious themes, such as punishment, redemption and sacrifice (as legitimization of violence), occupy a central role in the artist’s work. A pioneer of video art, Restrepo puts the documentary image in dialogue through a work exhibited under several formats and devices, using the resources of video technology and electronic image to accentuate a deviation from the discourses of the entertainment and the mainstream of contemporary art.

Maria Teresa Hincapie (1956-2008), with a strong imprint due to the experience within the anthropological theater towards the end of the 70s, developed a corpus of work where the rigorous handling of the body, a great sense of the intervened space and time, occupy crucial aspects in her creations. Her extensive training and research on dance and theater in different cultures – especially oriental ones – linked her work especially with the field of performance, becoming one of its most prominent representatives in Colombia. Her visual actions, of an intense gestural and poetic character, reveal gender issues such as oppression, loneliness and abandonment. The static and tense rhythms of her presentations create an atmosphere that is often claustrophobic and openly critical of certain circumstances of social and sexual alienation. The artist carried out actions that took physical effort to limits that revealed pain as an intimate and universal expression.

“PARQUEDADES : PARK SCENES FOR AN ACTRESS, VIDEO AND MUSIC” (1987) is a video-action conceived by Jose Alejandro Restrepo to be performed by Maria Teresa Hincapie. This work is one of the earliest expressions of experimental video performance exercises in Colombia, that revealed the possibilities of interaction and exchanges between the language of visual, technological & performative arts. The work was composed by 5 TV monitors that reproduced, lacking of linearity narrative, images of situations in the context of a park: benches, pigeons, details of a woman’s body, among other elements; while Hincapie, in real time, improvised a durational performance with slow movements and sustained gestures between the monitors on stage.

The Gallery

Rolf Art, located in Buenos Aires and founded by Florencia Giordana Braun in 2009, is the only art gallery specialized in technical image in Argentina. Focused on contemporary Latin American visual arts, the gallery features works exploring photographic media and its boundaries. The selection of artworks considers pieces with an inextricable union between critical density and aesthetic value. The curatorial profile challenges the political context & considers the social and economical background of artistic production as a determining factor for art’s interpretation. The gallery is committed to a select group of contemporary established Latin American artists, promoting them on a national and international basis.

Information

Esmeralda 1353
C1007ABS Buenos Aires, Argentina.