10th September – 12th December 2015
Opening: 10th September 2015, 7 pm

Proyecto AMIL
Centro Comercial Camino Real
Lima

Armando Andrade Tudela’s work outlines a back and forth journey between different cultural worlds. Each series is a milestone in symbolic, aesthetic and discursive itineraries, which suggest but fail to provide an encounter. His works are a collision between different perceptual, sensory and intellectual frameworks whose references intertwine and merge.

Andrade Tudela’s works propose an exchange between our fiction of the West (modernity, rationality, science) and our specter of the East (ancestry, ritual, magic). The idea of a “free zone” between both worlds emerges from the articulation of opposites: the structured and the disorganized, the firm and the fragile, the material and the spiritual. The systematic and random converge in Mitades XXL; a series of large tunic-like sculptures made from pieces of printed fabric sewn together. One layer of fabric has a printed pattern derived from marks of plaster, producing an irregular and erratic design. Another layer reveals a typographical pattern based on images of distorted bodies that, on the contrary, works like a code of sorts. This strange typography spells words from the Amazon found in the glossary of The Three Halves of Ino Moxo: Teachings of the Wizard of the Upper Amazon, the novel of the late Peruvian poet Cesar Calvo, which recounts a geographical and mystical journey into the depths of the jungle.

Through this information, we are allowed to interpret these pieces as huge “cushmas” (one-piece garments of the Ashaninka, Amuesha and Machiguenga people). Too large for clothing however, they also recall makeshift shelters such as tents or huts. This dual reference combined with their floating presentation suggests the idea of portability and transit; their use of language indicates a primary path running, so to speak, from the physical to the metaphysical. On one hand, language itself is a medium we inhabit, from which we build our reality. On the other, the font of impossibly contorted and distorted bodies, suggests the disintegration of the self. The echo of a ritual trance with ayahuasca, invoked by the literary reference, allows the works to go beyond the limits of the body, passing through different realities and inhabiting different worlds (or perhaps meditating between them) in a kind of nomadic journey.

Nomadism is also present in the Rama (branch) sculptures, which seem reminiscent of childhood imaginary adventures and escape (in the orbit of adventure stories and the Picaresque Novel). The works are bronze replicas of branches found in parks, on which translucent plastic bags containing dissimilar objects hang. The contents, partially recognizable through the bags include cell-phone manuals, door handles and seashells.  Since this luggage is impractical for any trip, the question arises: what hides beneath these objects? Any escape is potentially a one-way trip, therefore, these sculptures speak of our ties: to objects, to places, to our memories and even to our own sense of self.

The Nostransferimos series (whose title refers to the cloud-based file transfer service ‘WeTransfer’) consists of sculptures made by pouring plaster into boxes holding previously made artworks. The contents of these boxes and their interior shapes determine the final outcome; once again the artist traces a margin between two opposites, connecting them. This fabrication process links containment (the box and the plaster) and overflow (the eruption of plaster in the box occupying all empty spaces). Connecting preservation and transformation, the contents are safeguarded but also annulled in an amorphous volume, nevertheless, faithfully recording the characteristics of the mold. Through the paradoxical articulation of opposites implemented in his works, Andrade Tudela stages an encounter that does not take place; a collision between realms that are alien yet near.

Armando Andrade Tudela (b. 1975, Lima/PE) is an artist living and working between Lyon, France, and Berlin, Germany. Andrade Tudela studied at Pontificia Universidad Católica, Lima, Peru, The Royal College of Art, London, and at the Jan Van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht.