Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

Adriana Valdés wrote this essay for the catalogue for an exhibition of works by Mónica Bengoa. Organizing her text around six themes, Valdés writes about stories, pixels, the unspeakable, “To the sound of a smooth, soft [...]

In this essay Adriana Valdés discusses the production of women artists, and takes a sweeping look at women artists in Latin America and Chile. She follows María Zambrano’s lead regarding the cultural and historical forces that [...]

In this text the essayist Adriana Valdés discusses the work of Alicia Villarreal, who has created a game based on the alphabet that uses images of discarded objects as vowels to be read as a text. Based on the Walter Benjamin quote (the search [...]

Adriana Valdés provides an in-depth review of Roser Bru’s body of work, arranged in three sections: “Materias” (Subjects), includes works produced since 1961, the year when she met Antoni Tàpies and started applying [...]

In this essay Adriana Valdés discusses Pintura por encargo (Commissioned Painting), the work by the visual and Conceptual artist Gonzalo Díaz. Valdés describes it as follows: the viewer stands before a commissioned portrait of D& [...]

“La crítica de avanzada y algunos de sus efectos: reflexión sobre un libro de Nelly Richard” (Criticism of the Escena de Avanzada and Some of its Effects: Reflections on a Book by Nelly Richard) was written by Adriana Vald& [...]

In her essay about an exhibition of paintings by Roser Bru, Adriana Valdés refers to Bru’s portraits of Franz Kafka, Milena Jesenská, and Anne Frank, commenting on the sitters’ eyes and how they gaze out from the canvas to [...]

Adriana Valdés discusses Margins and Institutions. Art in Chile Since 1973, the book by Nelly Richard. Valdés pays particular attention to “the writing scene,” which included Richard as well as others who contributed to the [...]

This article by Adriana Valdés is a continuation of “Escritura y silenciamiento” (Writing and Silencing) published in 1977 in Revista Mensaje, a text that would have been unthinkable at the height of the repression and censorship [...]

This article by Adriana Valdés appeared in the catalogue Lecciones de cosas. 7 textos postfacio about the installation Quadrivium ad usum Delphini (1998) by Gonzalo Díaz. The author bases her review of the texts in the book on a [...]

In this article, Adriana Valdés discusses the work of Alfredo Jaar, specifically his installations, which she sees as opportunities for open reflection. She rates “space” above “message,” since Jaar’s work does [...]

In 1998, Adriana Valdés discusses “Estudios sobre la felicidad” and the review she had written about this work by Alfredo Jaar. She refers to the concepts known as the “open work” (Umberto Eco, 1962) and “ [...]