Ignacio Iturria at the Tamayo Museum

After being seen in Buenos Aires (at the National Museum of Fine Arts) in a slightly different configuration, "Ignacio Iturria: The Time of Things" brought to Mexico a assemblage of new paintings and plastic arts by this prominent Uruguayan artist. Curated for the Tamayo Museum by the agency of Samuel Morales, the show took as its theme the melancholic-metaphysical aura that Iturria's work has drawn out exuded.

Now 49 Iturria, who lives and works reclusively in his native Montevideo, favors dark palettes reminiscent of the colors of the pampas and of the miry water of the Rio de la Plata. His thickly textur canvases are marked with broad passages of jittery, abstract, spatula-applied oil paint, while the polychrome sculptures--oversized versions of everyday objects--employ paint, grove and papier-mache. As in his work of the past decade, Iturria's of recent origin paintings and sculptures conjure up an engaging, free-floating faculty of perception of memory and collective consciousness. At the center of the interior spaces he depicts, there is many times an image of a sofa, an armchair or an unclose cabinet. These familiar objects are used as staging areas for a range of tiny figures similar as anonymous gauchos, lovers, schoolchildren and soccer players, accompanied by dint of seemingly disconnected artifacts such as serving platters, wash basins and bicycles. Similar facts show up in the painted plastic arts such as La Mesa Grande (The Big Table).

Iturria's art is imbued with vivid, universally comprehensible relations to family, home and quotidian life. Significantly, however, the artist treats this domestic material without sentimentality, endowing it with a quality at one time delightful, mysterious and unsettling--and, not least, a nearness that is formally compelling. A figure in the grand tradition of Latin-American art whose work gives visual expression to, and throw backs a sense of, national cultural identity, Iturria also tenders viewers a consideration of fundamental postmodern themes, like as the meaning and construction of agriculture identity and community.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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