Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary is pleased to announce its participation in ARCOmadrid 2024 with a two-person presentation of work by Freddy Rodríguez and Juan Sánchez. Our stand will particpitate in the fair's curated section, as part of the shore, the tide, the current: an oceanic Caribbean, curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates and Sara Hermann Morera.
Using the shoreline as an allegorically productive tool and a lens for analysis, the works on view in this section speak to flux, hybridity, exchange, and transformation. the shore, the tide, the current: an oceanic Caribbean seeks to trouble the notion of the Caribbean sea itself, pushing against the idea of this body of water as insular or cordoned off, using art objects to elucidate upon the ways in which the Caribbean (and its subjects) are not in fact isolated but part of the larger world, networked-in via histories of trade, systematic opression, ecology, and migration.
In particular, the curators refuse the idea of a fixed Caribbean identity, this lack of fixedness being reflected in the geography of the shore, which, despite occupying a particular spatial coordinate, is always in a state of flux, being transformed by the world around it, and in turn, transforming it. As such, the selection of Freddy Rodríguez and Juan Sánchez is apt. Both of these artists have historical ties to the Caribbean (Rodríguez via his birth in the Dominican Republic and Sánchez via his parents roots in Puerto Rico) yet also refuse any clean categories of identity; they are both rooted in the Caribbean, and yet, subvert this origin point. At ARCOmadrid, Rodríguez's abstract compositions mobilize references to gold as a way to delve into conversations regarding human nature, posing the question: is a lust for gold a universal condition in the human psyche? And if so, does it inevitably lead to corruption? This set of questions is not only relevant for the Dominican Republic, but the history of the Caribbean as a whole, and its long and complex history of gold mining which is tightly bound to histories of Spanish colonialism and its resulting atrocities. Furthermore, the use of gold demands questions regarding the art object itself. Here, by giving his canvases a monochromatic ground that evokes gold leaf, Rodríguez collapses a signifier of wealth with the paintings, probing the viewer to question their attitudes regarding what they value in art itself.
Sánchez's collages draw from his working-class upbringing in Brooklyn's Puerto Rican communities, using his original silver gelatin photographs from the 1970s taken of everyday people as the focal point for these works. They reference the streetscapes of Bushwick and Brownsville, Brooklyn, where the artist grew up, in which postering and graffiti played a major role in the aesthetic quality of the environment, while also drawing from long histories of political print and poster making. Repeated evocations and depictions of the Puerto Rican flag in this set of works gesture towards the continued struggle of Puerto Rican people for independence, while also drawing attention to the diaspora in the United States, and their struggle for social, political, and economic equality. These particular works are pulled from the artist's Fractured Grid series, in which the composition's construction is tightly regimented by the grid form. Repeated within each square of the grid is an image of the Puerto Rican flag; however, counter to the regimented nature of the grid, each flag takes up a unique formal expression. As the artist has noted, this formal dialogue possesses an allegorical angle, gesturing towards the ways in which the organized structure of the colonial state attempts to hem in its subjects, and yet, begins to breakdown in face of socio-cultural expression by the colonized.
