It has been 35 years since the Atlantic Center of Modern Art (CAAM) was inaugurated in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria with the exhibition titled Surrealism between Old and New World. It was an extraordinary exhibition, curated by Juan Manuel Bonet, with which, from its first moment, the CAAM was affected, with more relevance than any other Spanish museum, to the approach of identity, diversity and mestizaje to which it called the natural condition of the islands themselves. Some Canarian artists, such as Martín Chirino or Manolo Millares, had already vindicated Africanist inspiration at the time, but CAAM did more: it made the Canarian geostrategic crossroads the center of its programmatic line.
Europe, America and Africa come together in the CAAM, and it is the attention to this particularity that makes it resistant to the exhausting mainstream of contemporary art. However, this natural condition, between three continents, does not crystallize naturally in the work of culture that is a museum; It requires an active reading that is attentive to the changes in perspective that, by the way, have been drastic in recent years. If we leave aside Latin America and its more widespread art, it is the attention to African art that is most revealing of this new point of view.
The CAAM has dedicated several specific exhibitions to him, the last one in 2016. But, much earlier, in 1990, it offered a particularly relevant exhibition —Africa today— because it sent to Las Palmas part of the famous Magicians of the land, which the Pompidou had produced a year earlier. The formerly called artistic “primitivisms” and, with them, the appropriation of forms considered exotic – without history – then began to be considered in their own evolution over time – with history – and in communication with the rest of the cultural forms. . It would, therefore, be the reverse operation of that carried out by Picasso after his “black” visits to the Trocadero.
The works now selected from the CAAM’s own collection—of some 140 artists from 25 countries—by the curators Cristina Déniz, Mari Carmen Rodríguez and Beatriz Sánchez have given rise to Recent memory. contemporary practices, a renewed variation of that founding inspiration and this new perspective. His journey is not exactly chronological, but rather argumentative: tradition or traditions, specific works produced in the center itself, the landscape or the ritual construction of social ties. The conclusion is an amenity that as a museum value is largely forgotten. But the other result is that the great European names (Hannah Collins, Olafur Eliasson or Salvatore Mangione), the Africans (Mwangi Hutter or Ghada Amer) and the Americans (Vik Muniz or Raquel Paiewonsky) do not exclude each other territorially as curiosities. On the contrary, they are a kind of inhabited circles whose movement describes intersections. There are even works that, in themselves, represent crossroads, such as the Afro-Caribbean work by Cuban José Bedia. The richness, surprise and conflict of the new approach come from its coexistence in space and its simultaneity in time. However, the most notable thing is the way in which the Canarian artists enter and leave their particular circle, the largest: the almost edible painting of Santiago Palenzuela, the geometries of Margo Delgado or the PSJM collective, the figurations of Ibai Murillo or Cristina Toledo and, above all, the wonderful works in which Greta Chicheri, Ángel Luis Aldai and Luis Palmero evoke Justo Jorge Oramas.
It is an exhibition for those who want to walk and contemplate, rather than listen to sermons. Today, by virtue of its distortion, the term “decolonization”—launched decades ago on North American campuses, and very appropriate to the extractive and exterminating Anglo-Saxon colonization—seems to have already become the rattle of a political slogan. Because, in view of this depth and breadth of art in space and time that the CAAM offers us, at what point in the dreamed archaic paradise should we freeze history? And, specifically, are we colonizers or colonized? You have to ask in Texas, in Puerto Rico. Primitivism and its nephew, indigenism, were essentially works of suggestion; Chirino and Millares invoked some unknown Guanche gods as a passport for their international trip. Today things are different.
‘Recent memory’. CAAM. The Gran Canarian palms. Until the 2nd of June.
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