Rimer Cardillo at MNAV
Paper Prints by Rimer Cardillo from his MNAV Retrospective
Over the past couple of years, the National Museum of Visual Arts (MNAV) in Montevideo has presented numerous solo exhibitions featuring works by internationally-renowned Uruguayan artists who rely upon alternative materials utilized in distinct processes that harken special relationships between the distant past, present, and future. Reviewed here is the MNAV retrospective of Rimer Cardillo in 2018 (open until August 19th) as well as links to mid-career reviews of Veronica Vazquez and Marco Maggi, both originally presented at MNAV as well as leading galleries and fairs worldwide.
Like many established Uruguayan artists, all three benefit from timeless art and its extended shelf-life granted to any body of artwork grounded in solid theory that remains approachable over decades while also being unique and currently relevant to its own generation.
Rimer Cardillo (Montevideo, Uruguay, 1944) splits time between his native Uruguay and the Hudson Valley of New York where he continues to serve as an art professor at SUNY New Paltz. In “Del Río de la Plata al Valle del Río Hudson,” curators Kark Willers and Manuel Neves trace many of Cardillo’s visual tangents, from early academic days to his most recent applications of digital imaging. Included are site-specific installations, sculptures, digital and traditional photography, drawings, collages, etchings and a large collection of limited-edition prints. Indeed, what strikes us more than any particular series is Cardillo’s flexibility and the cohesion of his entire canon despite the artist being an early adopter of the new materials, tools and techniques throughout his esteemed career.
As with many of Uruguay’s most successful artists, Cardillo remains on the forefront of new aesthetic challenges but never ceases to cast a gaze back through centuries of Latin America's history for related clues, concerns and questions, be it the plight of its people, regional political threats to personal liberty and sovereignty, tenuous cultural survival and pleas for ambiental sanity.
Highlights are the fossil-like gesso castings and relief works crafted out of papers that are, for many, Carillo’s signature work. Two photo & fabric collages are marvelous, as our some of Cardillo’s drawings, metal etchings and large-scale multi-page prints.
The scientific studies of birds and insects can, over time, appear clinical and static when viewed singularly one after another. When presented en masse across expansive museum walls, they create a resounding wall of incarnate silent pleas.
At times as much an archeological exposition or science project as an art show, Carillo provides a constant push-pull between death & loss versus dreams & hope. Prevalent throughout the vast presentation is a bilateral dialogue between history and progress framed through a proud culture’s core values, a solid framework of pillars and complex matrices to which Latin America must continue to embrace despite difficult regional and global changes.
Whether rightful or not, one walks away feeling that a primary mission of Rimer Cardillo is the promotion of a definitive Latin American rubric combined with a platform for future generations to embrace and expand.
Video walk-through with R.Cardillo
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The Cardillo Retrospective can be viewed free of charge at MNAV, Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales in Parque Rodo, Monteivdeo.