Photo by Jonas Leihener. Courtesy Carl Freedman Gallery, London

Armando Andrade Tudela, "Untitled (Photography and Glass #1–4)" (2007–08). Photographic print mounted on PVC, glass

October 2008 Reviews

Manifesta 7

Jeff Koons

Chantal Akerman

Painting: Now and Forever, Part II

Erkka Nissinen

There is No There There

Elaine Duigenan

Kerry James Marshall

Peter Saul

John Massey

Bridget Riley

Pipilotti Rist

Thomas Helbig

Gary Hume

Marine Hugonnier

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“Gamblers Die Broke,” Peruvian artist Armando Andrade Tudela’s first show in Switzerland, borrows its title from the movie Asphalt Jungle, by John Huston. Asphalt is also the material of a series of nine amorphic black sculptures (all Untitled, 2008), resting on bases next to transparent, wavelike, folded acrylic structures on top of promotion ads for gambling halls. The referential wordplay continues in lines like “a stack of creativity” under a stack of chips, equally referring to brokers’ stacks. Similarly ambiguous is the installation of two series of drawings collectively titled “Bars and Corners” (2008), hung back-to-back on two sides of the same wall (and around the corners). One (22 Corners) shows scruffy Parisian street corners, drawn in a deliberately “brut” style; the other (22 Bars), very minimal vertical interventions on lined writing paper. Andrade Tudela’s aim, in playfully mixing disparate cultural echelons in various media— which, here, also include films and dotty op-art-inflected photograms presented behind thick sheets of tinted glass—is to investigate interfacings of modernism, popular culture, and politics. Like the exponents of the tropicália movement of the 1970s, but coming from a generation of artists who grew up in a globalized artworld that has already absorbed “tropical modernism,” he believes in the process of assimilation of ideas—not as linear inspiration from one culture into another, but as subversive parallelisms and complex palimpsests of creation. Untitled #2 (Espace Niemeyer and Infra Red Lamp) (2007) is exemplary: the facade of Oscar Niemeyer’s iconic Communist headquarters building in Paris partially superimposed with the light of an infrared lamp—an image of utopian reality transformed by visual abstraction. "Armando Andrade Tudela" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.