06/12/2024
Quintín Rivera Toro
“Este Almendro Salvará el País” (This Almond Tree will Save the Country)
2021
15” x 19” x 86”
On view at the “Archipiélago” group show. Curated by Gamaliel Herrera, the exhibition opens today at Lamontagne Gallery, Boston MA.
Archipelago explores notions of
contemporary Caribbean landscape,
tying to a current exhibition of loans
from the Museo de Arte de Ponce at the
MFA Boston.
ARCHIPELAGO, EXPLORING NOTIONS OF CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN LANDSCAPE
Historically, the Caribbean could be conceived as a model for the processes of recombination and blending of cultures that are taking place during our time due to globalization. The Caribbean is an early petri dish for
creolization, the process of blending different cultural elements to create a new culture or language. Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant (1928-2011) spoke of a poetics of relationship in the Caribbean and introduced the notion of antillanité as a way of reconsidering the world as archipelago.
Traditional conceptions of landscape link the human gaze with the physical environment; however, landscapes are more than portions of nature that are static and simply arranged to be apprehended. There are innumerable mediations that respond to the sphere of culture that inform our view. The role of the landscape is cardinal in the Caribbean discourse. It goes beyond its consenting category of décor to drive the viewer to a process of immersion, reconnaissance and rediscovery. The peoples of the Caribbean experience their landscape as pathos, exuberance and ecstasy, a phenomenology to which Glissant alluded to as poetic outlet for the shipwrecked.
In this exhibition I have attempted to put together a glimpse into the many ways a group of young contemporary artists are questioning and reworking stereotypical conceptions of landscape in the context of the Caribbean. In the Caribbean, the landscape/identity relationship is inscribed in an ambivalent way: on the one hand, there is a centrifugal thirst for the horizon; on the other, there is a thirst for home.
Gamaliel Herrera
