With this exhibition of Secret Affinities / Aesthetics of Two Worlds, the Juan Carlos Maldonado Collection continues to pursue its profound interest in the exchanges that have nourished much of Western aesthetics for nearly the last two centuries. Having been remarked upon a thousand times, it is a widely known fact that beginning with the end of the 19th century, throughout the 20th, and even into the 21st century, European and American art draws heavily on the aesthetics discovered in non-Western communities; this is true whether they come from cultures in the sub-Saharan region, Oceania, or the Americas. The fact that these affinities have been widely documented, however, does not mean that they yield to understanding easily or that they can be explained without reservations. The works are there, nonetheless, bearing witness to that constant and beautiful affinity that surprises anyone who stops to consider the manifestations – abstract or not – of modern and contemporary art when compared to non-Western productions, to give a name to the arts for which we do not yet find a satisfactory term with which to name them. Primitive (as they were called for a long time) first, primeval, or ancestral, even though many of them are strictly contemporary with the work of their European and American admirers. The fact remains that Western art has not stopped seeing in them and in their aesthetic principles a secret affinity that this exhibition of the Juan Carlos Maldonado Collection addresses once again, giving evidence to the fascination that these arts continue to exert on all sensibilities, modern and contemporary.
That is why, putting them into dialogue, we have brought together the pre-Columbian pieces of the collection (textiles and vessels – fundamentally Andean) with other modern and contemporary textiles by artists from Europe, Asia, and America, as well as with some pictorial pieces that demonstrate more than a few affinities among them. We do not mean to say that all these pieces respond to the same aesthetic demands, or that they are equivalent to one another; but rather, that they are produced in historical, economic, and cultural contexts that are sometimes diametrically opposed. Furthermore, it is important to note that, intending to respond to different symbolic needs, their authors share a sensitivity towards the forms that make them members of a great human family, a family which from Lascaux and Altamira to some of the most recent artistic manifestations, has wanted to leave testimony of its passage through the world. They have done so with a peculiar sensitivity towards the materials and tools at their disposal, respecting their chromatic particularities, their textures, and their finishes in that balance between what is seen and what is thought, which is characteristic of both the art we call modern, and the arts produced in the most diverse human contexts of the remote past.
Today, the Juan Carlos Maldonado Collection feels the call of the artistic productions of the first peoples of the Americas; and its astonishment has not ceased to grow every time it discovers those secret affinities that we show today between, for example, Andean textiles that predated the Spanish conquest, the work of abstract-geometric artists – whether American, European, or Asian – and some of the most recent productions of contemporary art. In some cases, a conscious and voluntary desire for historical filiation (as in the case of Torres-García) and in some, the technical demands of textiles help to explain the observed affinities. And on the contrary, on other occasions, we find a much more secret and profound analogy, which cannot be easily explained, and which amazes every sensitive observer.
Ariel Jiménez
Curator