Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this text, artist Ricardo Basbaum reflects on specific aspects of his production in order to investigate the broader issues underlying his Novas Bases para a Personalidade (NBP) project. By means of the oral style of the text, the artist engages [...]

The Colombian artist Víctor Laignelet discusses the ability in painting to expand its range of action—what he calls its antropofagia [anthropophagy]—as it absorbs “new visual expressions” such as “installations,” exposing the roots of [...]

The researcher Victoria de Stefano wrote the introduction to a catalogue for the 1985 exhibition Nenias by the graphic designer Gerd Leufert at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas. She provides an overview of the artist’s work, in contrast with [...]

In this text, researcher Lucia Santaella formulates a study that identifies and examines the changes in paradigm for the production, storage, exhibition, and reception of the image in different registers of the human psyche. She associates the [...]

Daniela Bousso opens the roundtable by introducing the participants, their practices, and their work in the realm of audiovisual art. Christine Mello assesses the Prêmio Sérgio Motta, which, in her view, is limited insofar as it is a prize for [...]

In this text, Julio Plaza draws a parallel between photography’s impact on nineteenth-century iconography and the current transformation with images that no longer depend on artisanal or mechanical systems, but rather on digital ones. Plaza senses [...]

In the opinion of Stefania Bril, Vilém Flusser’s attempt to categorize photography according to a number of concepts—as both Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag had done before him, articulating “post-historical” thinking in the process— [...]

Tadeu Chiarelli sees “the quote” as one of the defining features of contemporary art, taken from visual systems and inspired by a vast array of images and preexisting artistic procedures. He scours his sources, noting the role played by [...]

According to the poet Gabriel Araujo, the Venezuelan visual artist Luis Romero’s works on paper stretch limits and genres, and overrun the borders of literature. Romero associates images with words that complement each other (“the opacity of the [...]

This essay by Sybil Venegas was the introduction to the catalogue of the 1990 exhibition, Image and Identity,which was curated by him and held at the Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. According to Venegas, [...]

Architects and theoreticians Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas assert that the work of conceptual Argentinean artist Lea Lublin is a reflection in a practical state, since it unravels the mechanisms ruling the production of images in the [...]

This text by Arlindo Machado addresses iconoclasm, that is, aversion to the image. Some cultures over the course of history—among them Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Greek and Reformation thought—have nourished mistrust, and even rejection, of [...]

Reply of Argentinean artist Perla Benveniste to the summons to express herself against the 1971 São Paulo Biennial. This artist responds through a graphic image with geometric forms printed over a hand [...]

The conceptual artist Lea Lublin writes that her work analyzes the problem of the image stemming from its inscription in space, which is considered as a continuous medium of transformations. For her, the artwork is an image index (which is off- [...]

In this article Miguel von Dangel describes the three classifications he uses for images and art. Inspired by Umberto Eco’s semiological ideas, the first of these explains the depiction of horror and monstrous ideas in art as a way to reveal “the [...]