Juxtapoz Magazine – CALYPSO: Alejandro Cardenas @ Almine Rech, Paris

Almine Rech Paris is delighted to existing Alejandro Cardenas‘ 3rd solo exhibition with the gallery, on view by April 23, 2022.

‘CALYPSO’ is the title that Alejandro Cardenas offers to his 3rd solo exhibition with Almine Rech, and 2nd one particular in Paris, next ‘PARADOXA.’ This time, Cardenas responds with paintings and sculptures to Homer’s Odyssey, and far more exclusively to the several years Odysseus used with the nymph Calypso in Ogygia. Prior to turning to the access of Cardenas’ interpretation of that portion of the poem, it ought to be famous that he has divided the exhibition into a few components. The main area focuses on Odysseus’s many years in Ogygia. 1 place connected to it promotions with the suitors of Penelope, when a further gives meditations on the questions that the exhibition raises. Cardenas’ latest entire body of works constitutes a instead abnormal second in contemporary portray and sculpture insofar as it presents the reflections of an artist who very virtually engaged with a classical textual resource, in an age where the tendency bends to oblique displays of traces of strategies, as Jean-Luc Nancy has shown in Les Muses. A single can obtain in the very verses of Homer’s Odyssey the matrix of the paintings and sculptures from ‘CALYPSO.’ The operates are nevertheless not mere visual ekphrases confined to the Odyssey. Cardenas weaves alongside one another webs of which means throughout time. He intertwines Homer’s poem with Ancient Greek sculptures, as effectively as references from different durations and locations, whose significations thus discover on their own deepened or altered.

— Théo de Luca, Author, Yale University