Geometric Dreams from Mexico to the Tierra del Fuego
250 works by more than 70 artists and creators from the pre-Columbian period to the present
“‘I have dreamed geometry
I have dreamed the point, the line, the plane, and the volume
I have dreamed yellow, blue and red.”
These lines from Jorge Luis Borges’s poem ‘Descartes’ (1981) are found on the opening page of the catalogue to ‘Géométries sud, du Mexique à la Terre de feu’ (Southern Geometries, from Mexico to the Tierra del Fuego). A fitting epigraph, they announce the vertiginous profusion of coloured shapes in the nearly 250 works by more than 70 artists and creators from the pre-Columbian period to the present.
Exploring the predominance of geometric motifs across a wide variety of media, the exhibition is an impressive display of the diversity of aesthetics and discourses derived from a limited repertoire of forms. For Juan Araujo, for instance, the square is imbued with the legacy of Josef Albers. In Homage to the Square #1 (2016), Araujo carefully re-creates one of Albers’s iconic works, recording even the simple metal frame and the oblique shadow that it casts on the wall from which it hangs, slightly crooked: constructivist modernism presented as something a little less than perfect or universal.
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