Lost Labour
Armando Andrade Tudela
00.08.25-00.09.25
For Armando Andrade Tudela, modern art and architecture are suspect fields, their histories and aesthetics open to adaptation and appropriation. Born in Lima and based in Europe, he recontextualizes the history of art through the critical use of everyday materials and handmade forms.
For the slideshow Camión, he photographed the large, geometric designs decorating trucks on Peruvian highways. Hand-painted by their owners, they capture the widespread popularity of a geometric abstraction reminiscent of the works of artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella. Using a format that alludes to John Baldessari’s self-consciously banal photographic work The Back of All the Trucks Passed While Driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, Calif., Sunday 20 Jan. 63 (1963), Andrade Tudela locates another tradition of abstract painting on the highways of Peru. Photographing the truck paintings from an oblique point of view (from behind his windshield), he puts them in dialogue with the hard-edge style of mid-century North American painters.
Huaco deforme examines the material and form of an artifact from the Chancay culture of ancient Peru. Though the clay vessel was deformed (and lost its functionality) during the firing process, it found its way into the collection of Yoshitaro Amano, a Japanese businessman who arrived in Peru in the 1930s. Encountering it at the Amano Pre-Columbian Textile Museum in 2011, Andrade Tudela focused on the object’s presentation. For his video, he placed the vessel on a rotating pedestal, filming it in close-up to highlight its form. “My work swings on a pendulum of sorts, between the personal certainty of belonging to a brutal historical legacy and the need to refute this legacy through my work, with all the tools I have available to me—from the political to the vernacular,” he has said. What if pottery had aesthetic value to the Chancay beyond its function? Rather than bringing ancient practices into the story of modern art, as Indigenist artists sought to do in the early 20th century, Andrade Tudela proposes “to rethink the canon through the deformed.”