Rimer Cardillo at Cavin-Morris - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

The Uruguayan artist Rimer Cardillo freshly returned from the Amazon bearing the load of an anthropologist--notebooks, photographs and assembleed ceremonial objects---which he then took with him into his printmaking studio. The rise was "Pachamazon," this exhibition of prints and things reflecting studio processes and recording impressions gathered in the field. The installation revealed a master printer with a down-reaching concern for the destruction of the rainforest and the tillage of its inhabitants.

Unlike a professional anthropologist, Cardillo mixes art and artifact, abruptly shifting scale and medium. Larger-than-life photographic images and handwritten notes were juxtaposed with stretched skins and terra cotta animal casts. At the center of the installation was a assemblage of works narrating an incident of unspecified significance. On Aug. 22 1992 Cardillo photographed an unidentified indigenous woman carrying a heavy turtle-pigeon through a town on the Rio Pastaza. His snapshots became the basis for a series of floor-to-ceiling silkscreen prints, which were accompanied through a life-size wire sculpture of the turtle-pigeon and other mock artifacts.

Cardillo's banner silkscreens are ofttimes combined with woodcuts printed from immense boards carved with an electric router While greatest in quantity are printed on raw canvas, Woman with turtle-dove #3 appears on a variety of commercial wallpaper samples that are pinned to a wall. Each piece of wallpaper features artificial nature images, similar as orderly rows of stereotypical flowers or smiling bunnies, which make an ironic background for a photo of indigenous women engaged in a certain quantity of private task unaware that they are being watched. Cardillo's quite different touchs with anthropology and art processe are mirrored in the dualities of this piece: field observations are juxtaposed with decorative nature cliches, studio techniques contrast with the banality of mass-production printing.

Although the prints were emphasized here, Cardillo's plastic arts are striking independent works; the terra-cotta animals be entitled to an exhibition of their have a title to When they are fully integrated with other uncompounded bodys they make a touching memorial to the los of life in the Amazonian forests. Mulita Reliquary contains a terra-cotta cast of a preserv armadillo (Cardillo's flattened ceramic casts inevitably recommend roadkill). A small bare scaly bud inside the repository lights the armadillo, which reposes on aluminum foil, as if prepared for a barbeque. The laboriously crafted plastic art combines the weightiness and crudenes of the roadside reliquaries place in the Amazon region: raw-wood sawhorses support the shrine, which is itself set uped from forest wood and a rusted mailbox. Cardillo's plastic arts are adept applications of vernacular means to artistic extremitys and signs of his sensitivity to the tillage he studies.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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