03.04 — 06.27.2016
Curator: Lucrecia Palacios
Gallery 1. Level -1
Part I – Presentation + guided tour: Thursday, March 3, 8:00 p.m.
Part II – Opening: Thursday, April 14, 7:00 p.m.
One and two exhibitions at the same time, Cameo is a project conceived specifically for MALBA in which Juan Tessi investigates the relationship between painting and biological processes on the basis of a system of metaphors that identify pictorial surface with epidermis and picture with body.
The exhibition ensues in two different timeframes. The first moment, from March 3 to April 14, entails atomization. During this phase, the paintings will be placed in spaces in the museum identified and displayed on security cameras. Visitors can view the exhibition by following a spatial diagram that indicates the location of the pieces both inside and outside the museum building. During this period, Juan Tessi will use the gallery space as an office. He will select fragments of the cameras’ recordings. The gallery will also be the site of an intensive program of actions and lectures that will be registered and available for consultation.
Starting on April 14, the concentration phase of the project will begin: the paintings will be brought to the gallery where they will be exhibited alongside the prostheses used to affix them to the walls and to move them around the museum’s premises.
A film based on the recordings selected by Tessi will be projected in the gallery. As archives of their own time at the museum, the paintings bear traces of their previous locations. They are the product of the dialogue they established with the space and with those who observed them.
Somewhere between agency and passivity, the paintings are envisioned as actors that both look at and take part in the museum’s daily life. As such, they shed light on the dubious affinity between “reality show,” panopticon, security booth, and museum, and underscore systems for the regulation and distribution of images and bodies.
Juan Tessi
Lima, Perú 1972. Lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina
In 1989, he studied painting with Ricardo Garabito. In 1991, he received a scholarship to study at the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore. In 1994, he received a BFA with a major in painting. That same year, he participated in the Yale Norfolk Summer Residence. He returned to Argentina in 1998, where he began exhibiting individually and in group shows, both inside and outside the country. In 2010, he participated in the Kuitca/UTDT Scholarship. Group exhibitions: Absolutely Dark Background of Free Space, Klemm Foundation; Some Artists, Proa Foundation (2013); Plane, Weight, Point, and Measure, UTDT; LXV National Salon of Rosario, Castagnino Museum (2011). Elogio da diversidades. Galeria Antonio Berni O Instituto Brasil – Argentina. (2010) Cuentos Para No dormir, FNA; Obsession for Collection, Summerfield Gallery, University of Gloucestershire (2009), 700 % PLUS – Kbh Kunsthal_Centenniale, Copenhagen (2006), V Mercosul Biennial (2005) Dreamlike and Private, Telefonica Foundation (2004). He has held solo exhibitions at Miau Miau, Braga Menéndez, and the Ricardo Rojas Cultural Center – Buenos Aires, Casa Triangulo – Sao Paulo, Alexandre Pollazzon – London, MK Galerie – Rotterdam, Galería Moro – Santiago, Chile. Since 2009, together with Cristina Schiavi, he has organized and coordinated the non-commercial space Mark Morgan Perez Garage.
Catalogue
As part of the exhibition, MALBA will publish a Spanish-English book that will outline the main themes of the project. The book will include a curatorial essay by Lucrecia Palacios and a detailed photographic record of each of the paintings and their transformation in the space/time of the museum and mediation through cameras.
