Urban Forms is an exhibition in which the Juan Carlos Maldonado Collection (JCMC) seeks to identify some of the formal, technical, and theoretical links that integrate the recently acquired photographic selection into the already extensive work of universal geometric abstraction that shapes and characterizes the collection.
The exhibition comprises a series of images by Paolo Gasparini, an Italian-Venezuelan photographer, who documents some of the modern efforts in the field of architecture, especially in Brazil and Venezuela. It gives us the opportunity to perceive and study the numerous points of contact that exist between architectural experiences and pictorial practices throughout the 20th century, particularly in the middle part of the century, as well as within the field of abstraction. This is because the obvious formal closeness we observe among these works is not due to mere coincidences, but rather to the undeniable traces of shared pursuits that the continent’s visual artists and modern architects experienced during that period – just as their European counterparts who preceded and influenced them experienced, from the German Bauhaus and Dutch Neoplasticism to the Soviet avant-garde.
The exhibition, in a way, allows us to see how the explorations undertaken by both groups from the late 19th to early 20th centuries ultimately converged on a series of common objectives. Among these, the needs: to energize the pictorial surface of both abstract-geometric works and the bare walls of modern buildings; to control and appropriately employ light and color; to breathe life, in some way, into materials and their textures, so that the city would be more than just a lattice of functional structures devoid of any aesthetic dimension; and ultimately, to make the city a practical and pleasant living space for its increasingly numerous inhabitants.
Thus, Urban Forms constitutes an invitation from JCMC to reconsider a long and complex process, one in which visual artists and architects, sometimes in parallel and sometimes in close collaboration, worked to envision the forms of the modern city.
Curator
Ariel Jiménez