Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro – författare

Often simple in composition, the art of Waltercio Caldas invites a host of complex questions about perception and space. Caldas challenges not only the way we look at his objects in the moment, but also our perspectives on art more generally. For decades he has been a central figure in Brazilian art. While his influence extends across much of the art world, he has remained largely underrecognized in the United States. To make this exceptional artist more widely known to the U.S. audience, the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin and the FundaÇÃo IberÊ Camargo, a premier art organization in Porto Alegre, Brazil, have organized the exhibition The Nearest Air: A Survey of Works by Waltercio Caldas.The exhibition catalog Waltercio Caldas is the first illustrated English-language publication to fully explore Caldas’s four-decade artistic trajectory, his influences, and his impact. The catalog includes essays by the exhibition’s curator, Gabriel PÉrez-Barreiro, director of the ColecciÓn Patricia Phelps de Cisneros; leading art critic Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale University School of Art, who investigates Caldas’s work in relationship to that of his international peers and its importance in the history of art; and renowned art historian Richard Shiff, modern and contemporary art professor at the University of Texas, who discusses key Caldas works that epitomize his investigation of the history of art. The catalog also includes a selected chronology of the artist’s career and a selected bibliography.

The first comprehensive U.S. publication on a pioneer of Latin American artEstablishing congruences between Modernist abstraction and the Pre-Columbian traditions of the ancient Americas, Uruguayan artist Francisco Matto (1911-1995) was a pioneer of Latin American art, and one of the most significant students of El Taller Torres-García, the workshop school established by Joaquín Torres-García. Matto remained in his native Montevideo, Uruguay for all of his life, and was financially secure enough to not need to sell or promote his work; consequently, it rarely circulates in international exhibitions, instead remaining in the estate of the artist and a few private collections in Montevideo, New York, Houston and Belgium. The Modern and the Mythic is the first comprehensive U.S. publication on Matto, and presents more than five decades of artistic production, from the artist's early work under Torres-García to his late works of the 1990s.