PRESENCIA, the most recent exhibition of work from El Museo’s permanent collection, focuses on ideas of presence and its antithesis, absence. This theme is explored through photography, painting, prints, drawings, masks, and other objects. The exhibition investigates the visibility and invisibility of the human form through the presentation of the body in literal and conceptual ways. The featured artists play with their figures, showing bodies revealed and obscured, evidently displayed or camouflaged.
Featured artists include Luis Mendez, whose figurine sculptures and masks evoke both the ancient and modern stylistically harkening back to the artistic tradition of ancient cultures, yet rendered with the modernist attention to form and space; Shaun El C. Leonardo, a multi-discipline artist who embodies the traditional masculine and heroic figure of the Lucha Libre wrestler to explore the myths they perpetuate; and Oscar Muñoz, whose innovative use of carbon powder renders his self-portraits unstable, oscillating between existence and nothingness. Others on view include Benvenuto Chavajay, Christian Cravo, Roberto Juárez, Fernando Salicrup, and Rafael Tufiño.
