On one side of the Pan-American highway, in the town called Metetí, Panama, there is a hotel called Hotel Felicidad (Hotel Happiness).

Metetí has ​​always been known as a place of transit. Since the 70s –when the government made its way through the harsh Darién jungle– many migrants of all kinds, but especially Africans, began their long journey to North America there.

A few months ago ­–during those explorations on the internet that start looking for shirts and end up finding penguins– I came across this fantastic story, which to a large extent shaped this exhibition.

During the 1980s, African migrants found in Metetí a good place for a well-deserved rest on their way to the dangerous and dense Darién jungle. They hid where they could, even in the famous bunkers built by the gringos in 1941 after the attack on Pearl Harbor (since they were convinced that the next Japanese attack would take place there) and that have now become a tourist attraction of Metetí.

The living conditions of these migrants were very difficult, in the bunkers and in the jungle. In addition to facing the difficulties of the environment, they were harshly persecuted by the Senafront (National Border Service) in their passage through Panama.

In those years, and until recently, the owner of the Hotel Felicidad was a woman in her 40s called by all “la patrona (the boss) Isabel.” She was a great lover of two important themes: the music of the 70s and 80s, and her secret work hiding, protecting, and caring for the Africans who were passing through Metetí.

La patrona Isabel dedicated her little income, and the infrastructure of her hotel, to provide asylum and help all those people on their uncertain path to the north of the continent. The stories tell that, on the hot nights of the Panamanian summer, immigrants and residents of Metetí gathered in the gardens of the Hotel Felicidad to drink, dance, and make music. Apparently, in an attempt to please their generous hostess, African migrants combined their own music with eighties sounds, giving rise to a type of music of unprecedented syncretism that locals called rockoteti.

For years, la patrona Isabel helped hundreds of migrants in the passage, giving them asylum and food in exchange for music and parties. It is practically impossible to find examples of the famous rockoteti, but this story unleashed in my imagination an infinite amount of images and associations that resulted in some of the pieces that you can see in this exhibition.

The combination of music, cultures, and goodwill, in such a complex context, reminded me a lot of the moment we are living in, and that is why I decided to work on these paintings during the quarantine, as a reminder of true happiness.

When the quarantine started, we all had to save ourselves.

Some of us watched many series, some had many virtual meetings, others exercised, some resumed their hobbies, but those who had the least difficulty being locked up were the artists, they continued doing what they always do.

Being in his studio working, thinking, and creating.

In the case of Aldo Chaparro and Fernanda Caballero, this house/studio is located in Valle de Bravo. Through their networks, they made us participants in their creative process. Through their networks they made us participate in their creative process.

We saw how new works began, how some previous series continued or developed or how they created some unique pieces.

We also saw them live their daily lives where yoga, art, gardening, multiple animals, and pets coexist without beginning and end. In my case, it was very enriching to live these times through them. Now in this exhibition, their first set shows us the result of all this and they bring us a little of that life that they lead to this exhibition space.

Work full of color, life, and love.

Alejandro Romero

Art Miami and CONTEXT Art Miami Special Online Edition

🟥🟦⬜️🟨🟪

Una exposición de Aldo Chaparro y Alex Romero

Curada por Alonso Cedillo

Cozumel 81, Col Roma, CDMX

Too Late To die Young

Espacio German Krüger Espantoso

Sede ICPNA Miraflores, Lima Perú, March 12, 2020

Retrospective

Aldo Chaparro

Cuaratorship

Max Hernández Calvo

Throughout the years, Aldo Chaparro’s work has responded to a fundamental methodology: establishing a relationship of tension with a prime material in order to transform it.  Such a relationship may be traversed by a ludic sense or respond to an ironic gaze, but always seeks to make new possibilities contained in the materials, the shapes, the techniques, the processes, from which the concepts spring.

Apart from his stubborn relationship with physical material (such as those pieces that emerge from a conflict with steel or wood) Aldo Chaparro also deals with intangible materials such as artistic concepts and the protocols of the art world.

For example, he plays with the notion of carving, extrapolating said sculpting traditional technique to talk about the void, or likewise, parodies the idea of originality and authorship through his multiple quotes (like the lyrics on his posters) and his collaborative works (with the music band Plastilina Mosh, with the writer Mario Bellatin, or, trans-temporarily, with his father, Jose Chaparro).

The artist also rethinks the distinctions between art and design or contemplation and functionality, like with his Table for galleries or MCHF, his wall painting for exhibition halls. In this line,  it is relevant to remark on his promotion of other artist’s work. The Aparador Cuchilla, who he recreates in his study in Mexico City, offers us the opportunity to see the work of many artists (Pablo Ravina).

Is it maybe that the great concern soaking through Aldo’s trajectory deals with the question “what (else) does it mean to be an artist?”? To understand how he has tried to answer this question, it’s been decided to include his voice, which describes the selected projects for the show, that reveal his approach, methodology, and fundamental concerns, as well as the philosophical profoundness of his humor.

Hence his reference to death in the title: it is too late to die young (the doubtful cursed glamour  of romanticism),  but it’s also not a matter of asking death to hurry up. “Carpe diem”, said Horacio.  But we must not forget the words that follow the poem: “quam minimum credula postero” – trust minimally in tomorrow-.

Max Hernández Calvo

Songs for Fernanda

Nueve Ochenta

Diagonal 68 #12 – 42, Bogotá Colombia, March 12, 2020

Works by

Aldo Chaparro

I always thought that color was an innate knowledge that got more sophisticated through time and practice. That was definitely not my case.

I tried to paint 4 years, going from figurative to abstract many times, I played with stains, did collage, used text, gold sheets, oil paints,  acrylic paints, natural pigments, I sunbathed my canvases, left them under the rain, I studied Tiziano,  Rivera,  Velzquez,  Picasso, Mondrian,  futurists,  modernists,  cinematographers, etc.

But my paintings had an error in their very axis: they were always trying to talk about volume, if not the volume represented on the surface of the painting, it was about the volume of the painting itself. It was evident that my relationship with volume, the main axis of my activity as a sculptor, was an obstacle to relate to color freely.

It wasn’t until I came back from a trip to  Morocco where, looking for textiles in a small town of Altas, that I discovered  boucherites.  These are textiles one could interpret as badly done. Actually, nobody  in the town would sell them, and even got offended when asked about them. They weren’t badly done, it is simply a looser job which evidently roots from  improvisation.

Their noticeable laxity, which  broke every compositional rule by such free use of color, marked me forever. When I returned to Mexico, loaded with boucherites, I dedicated myself to try and understand them without much success oh, but it was then when my desire first sparked to solve this matter by painting myself.

We could say that the boucherites detonated in me a connection with myself that is less cerebral and more instinctive. Now when I start a painting I don’t have a clear idea of where I am going and how I will get there.

Contrary to the rest of my work which is pretty cerebral and technical, painting to me at this age is a way of connecting with myself,  to this channel or force which we don’t control, that constant source of emotion, images and feelings that can’t be translated or dominated.

One can only aspire to be used by it as an instrument to materialize in the form of shape and color. Maybe the best example I have to explain this is music. Each one is a song that must be listened to, waiting for its rhythm to reverberate empathically within us.

Arriba de la Mueblería (Above the Furniture Shop)

Aldo Chaparro Studio

Cozumel 81, Col. Roma Mexico City, February 4 – April 4, 2020

Works by

Aldo Chaparro

Fernanda Caballero

Carlos Baeza

Alonso Cedillo

Aldo Chaparro Studio presents four individual shows which simultaneously generate a reflection about flows and processes of contemporary artistic production in Mexico. It is a conjunction of works that play with the optical illusion and intuition. Guided by pleasure and debauchery, they’re extremely expressive of our era of simulacrum.

Based on the topic of vanitas, a baroque allegory about the transience of life, Cha Baeza exposes a series of photographs that reformulate iconographic motifs from still life, updating the relevance of the status of such genres. Baeza’s pictures trick the eye of the spectator: their chiaroscuro technique is quite agile so as to pass as paintings.

At the gallery we may find Aldo Chaparro’s most recent pictorial exploration. He also choses trompe l’oeil as a strategy. Questioning the limits of artistic surfaces, his modular paintings are reconfiguring tri-dimensionally in the space, passing for sculptures, or perhaps, for reliefs. These were inspired by the Moroccan boucherouites, textiles made from scraps which disregard any fixed patterns, only concerned with the harmony of the colors and the accumulation of shapes.

Alonso Cedillo parodies the cabinets of curiosities (wunderkammern), dating back to the seventeenth century, by sharing his Reaction Paintings, a small format series where he imitates  Facebook “reactions”. Alonso ironizes the era of hyperconsumerism and instant likes, where judgement has grown frivolous, through an analogue procedure linked to post digital art.

Last but not least, Fernanda Caballero takes over the Aparador Cuchilla with a pictoreal work which  unsettles its usual dynamic. Since 2009, under Alejandro Romero “Chicle” and Aldo Chaparro’s initiative, the display window has held several in situ commission works. Caballero, on the other hand, decided to install her piece on the outside of said display window, so that chance and the weather will dictate its fate. This gesture may be interpreted  as a poetic act of detachment.

The Abstract Cabinet

Galería Eduardo Secci

Florence – Italy, June 271 – September 7, 2019

Curated by Friederike Nymphius Dates

Eduardo Secci Contemporary is pleased to present the exhibition The Abstract Cabinet curated by Friederike Nymphius.

The show will feature works by a group of international artists coming from different artistic as well as cultural backgrounds. Although working with different media, they share an interest in abstract principles, interpreted and employed individually by each artist. The character of the concept is accentuated by the formally reduced formal aspect of the works, by the use of few colors like black, white, grey, silver contrasted with bright pink and blue. The artists mix an abstract vocabulary with a strong consciousness for the presence thus emphasizing the specific aesthetics of the show.

As the rest of his sculptures, Aldo Chaparro’s Totems(Lima, 1965,lives and works in Mexico City, New York and Lima)aren’t trying to create the illusion of reality. He has abandoned true to life perspective, working with artificial space relations that makes us think not into reality, but into its essence. This act allows us to the idle space and moment of creation, inwhichyouget to know yourself until you construct yourself.

Caro Jost (Munich 1965, lives and works in Munich and New York) based her research on the reproduction and documentation of time, space and events and placing them in a current, contemporary context. She started her long-term project Streetprintsin New York: using a special, self-developed technique to capture traces of the past, Jost takes real imprints of street and sidewalk surfaces on canvas from so far over 80 cities worldwide. “Streets and sidewalks are the purest reflections of our human way of life”, she once declared.

Beth Letain (California, 1976, lives and works in Berlin) works on monumentally scaled paintings, adamantly, absurdly honest about what they are: brightly colored stripes, squares, stacks, and slabs suspended across impossibly weightless white grounds. These are lively and quotidian forms, easily named but stubbornly resistant to description. In their simplicity, their unassuming thematic variations, these works hold up a mirror to painting’s modernist past.Gerold Miller(Altshausen, 1961, lives and works in Berlin) hasalwayspursued a radical and elegant strategy in which he exits the picture without actually leaving it.

The Monoforms are the furthest reaching development in this direction, for they stretch the traditional format of the ‘picture’ to the extreme. The actual process of arriving at the image has to be done by the viewer. By pointing to the wall as the ultimate ground, and dispensing with colorand form as theonlymeans, Miller revokesthe boundaries of abstract painting and minimalist sculpture, andpushes these categories into the realm of the conceptual.

Michael Staniak(1982, Melbournewhere he currently lives and works) creates the paintings mostly by hand -he builds up texture with uneven layers of plaster and then paints the surface in a range of ways -his paintings bear an uncanny resemblance to flat digital prints.Indeed, one must viewthe works up close to perceive any texture or depth, and as such, they behave like contemporary trompe l’oeil paintings that baffle the senses.

The works of Katja Strunz(1970, Ottweiler, lives and works in Berlin)bear the traces of lived experience, of a past that manifests itself through the use of recycled materials. Her sculptural practice, seeped in history, finds its roots in the constructivists and avant-gardes. While elegant in their construction, the sculptures also retain a handmade aspect, revealing their aging over time.

The influences of Blair Thurman(1961, New Orleans, lives and works in New York)range from Pop art and Minimalism to relics from childhood, popular music, and 1970s cinemas.

His standardized forms, pulled from slot-car racetracks, architectural frameworks, and found shapes from daily life, comprise a personal iconography; the fascinations of boyhood working to render the subliminal realm of abstract geometries more idiosyncratic and accessible.

The industrial printer isthe most natural artistic medium for Thomas Wachholz(1984, Cologne, where he lives and works): from the very beginning he has been experimenting with its technical capabilities, testing the limits of what is feasible.

The composition of the image which normally marks the unremovable beginning of graphic design, is shifted to the end and claims herewith a newpositioning for graphic design. Wachholz’ investigation on the limits of painting generates an art of opposites: machine versus manual, fullness versus void, color versus non-color.

Lengua Barbara

Galería Casado Santapau

Madrid – Spain, January 31 – March 3, 2019