12 National Geographic magazines (1978) cut and glued. Detail of installation at Stedelijk Museum Bureau
Diorama Penetrable (4 foreste tropicali)
4 books Foreste Tropicali cut and glued. Installation view at galeria Casas Riegner Bogota
Mauricio Lupini’s Diorama literally confronts viewer head on with the way in which others are represented. He has made a three-dimensional curtain of long strips of paper, cut out of 1978 issues of National Geographic. As viewer pass through it, they encounter fragments of photos and texts about other culture and places. At the same time the work refers to a geometric, abstract, three-dimensional work created in the 1960s by the Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto, through which viewer could also walk. Soto was the icon of ‘international style’ Latin American art of the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, Lupini re-presents this modern work of art from an ethnographic perspective. (by Roos Gortzak from the catalogue of the exhibition "Tropical Abstraction" at Stedelijk Museum Bureau)
The entrance to the Stedelijk Museum Bureau was hung with strips of
coloured paper, their dangling forms suggesting a beaded curtain in the doorway
of a sunsoaked equatorial hideaway, or a tickertape parade for the latest
President for Life of an obscure banana republic. Passing through them, it
became clear that they were formed from the pages of late 1970s’ issues of
National Geographic – flurries of rainforest swished by swatches of
mountaintops, camera ads and brown, indigenous breasts. This was Mauricio
Lupini’s Penetrable Diorama with Exotic Landscapes III (2005), a
reinterpretation of the ‘penetrables’ of Jesús Rafael Soto, the icon of 1960s’
and ‘70s International Style Latin American art. As an overture to ‘Tropical
Abstraction’ (curated by Roos Gortzak), a show concerned with the translation
of Latin America into words and images, it was perfect. While Lupini’s piece
literally tore the project of ethnography as infotainment to shreds, something
of its aesthetic (and perhaps its ethics) remained. After all, aren’t the faded
white pigment and clean-lined geometry of these flayed magazine pages exactly
those of a dilapidated Modernist high-rise in Mexico City or São Paulo, and
isn’t this something we take a certain type of problematic visual pleasure in?
(by Tom Morton from FRIEZE magazine, Issue 96, January-February 2006)