Bazaar - Pancho Luna

Pancho Luna. Galones de luz. Mixed Media. Variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist and Dot Fiftyone Gallery

Dot Fiftyone Gallery, Wynwood Art District - Miami

February 14 - April 4, 2009

By Rafael López-Ramos

Since the beginning of the 1990s, Pancho Luna has developed artistic work that analyzes global social and political themes, including globalization itself. He has mainly reflected on this theme through iconic maps on which the entire planet is converted into terra firma without oceans, but full of urban sprawl and highways. Now, almost a decade into the 21st Century, Luna inaugurates a solo exhibition entitled “Bazaar,” in which he once again evokes globalization in a more implicit way, through a trend that spans the world and especially the world of art: the vindication of design and its visual resources in the auratic context of a gallery or museum, by turning that discipline 180 degrees from its original function - whether informational or utilitarian and industrial- to the absolute freedom of self-referential aesthetic discourse.

The very title of the show at Dot Fiftyone Gallery (February 14 through April 4) alludes to one of the most basic and ancestral forms of marketplace. It comes from a Persian word that, in these times of supposed clashes between cultures, reminds us of how much we human beings have in common. It might also point to the omnipresence of design in the marketplace and in our lives.

Luna’s new series is comprised of two-dimensional wall pieces and objectual installations of clear Dadaist origin, - a kind of almost ready-made - especially Galones de luz (Gallons of Light), in which he utilizes a score of plastic gallon jugs converted into electric bulbs to weave a complex metaphor about consumption, recycling, energy and any other connotations one might derive from this. Finally, the title suggests a metaphysical contradiction by raising the possibility of measuring the intangible.

Since the beginning of this decade, there has been an aspect of Luna’s work that investigates themes related to language. In this project, that is made manifest in the piece Discusiones (Discussions), which simulates a kind of anagram or codified text, as well as in Libros (Books) in which he portrays a shelf of books on whose spines the titles are inverted, as though they should be read in the same way as Da Vinci’s manuscripts, in a mirror - or perhaps on the three-dimensional work with plastic reflective sheets hanging from the ceiling almost directly in front of the piece.

With “Bazaar,” Pancho Luna demonstrates that he continues to fully develop an oeuvre, which possesses the rare ability to arouse the capacity for play and reflection in the observer, while providing multiple possible interpretations.

Rafael López-Ramos: Visual artist and critic. Regularly reviews local exhibitions in Art Nexus magazine. Recently wrote the catalog essay for JPparalelos exhibition Migración of Language at SPACES, Cleveland.