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PRESENTATION
"POSTURE AND GEOMETRY IN THE ERA OF TROPICAL AUTOCRACY"

September 2 - October 15th, 2023

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Since the 1990s, the work of Alexander Apóstol (Barquisimeto, Venezuela, 1969) has highlighted the different codes of gender, race and identity that accompany the ideologies of Latin America. This critique encompasses both the colorful and optimistic imaginary of modernization and developmentalism, as well as the catalog of bodily and sexualized fantasies of continental nationalism and populism.

The center of his works, although not exclusive, is the oscillation of visual and ideological languages of the modern history of Venezuela, from the historicist and nativist vision displayed by realist painters such as Pedro Centeno Valentilla under the protection of the Marcos Pérez Jiménez dictatorship in the fifties, going through the utopia of energetic and bodily reinvention of constructivism in the oil boom of the 1960s and 1970s, to the endless, tragic and comical staging of the Bolivarian regime of the present. Supported by the skeptical exteriority provided by a homosexual perspective, Apóstol's art always highlights the coordinated way in which artistic representation is an accomplice and auxiliary to the imaginary production of the modern nation state, which depends on the sexualization of our gaze to give body to their successive utopias. Well, the oscillation of historical styles of regional art is also the succession of commitments to use desire and identity as secret apparatuses of domination.

Cuauhtemoc Medina

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