Curator:
Natalia Valencia Arango (Born in Colombia; lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico).

Description:
Group exhibition at Galerie Mor Charpentier in Paris, France, on view September 10 to October 29, 2011.

Featuring Alexander Apóstol, Milena Bonilla, José Dávila, Laura Gannon, Terence Gower, Pablo León de la Barra, and Mateo López.

“The notions of proportion, uniformity, and purity of the modernist architectural forms have been gradually affected by natural and political shifts brought by the passage of time. The curatorial aim of this exhibition is to interpret this transformation not as a failure, rather as a form of beauty generated by routine. The artists in the show allude with diverse languages to key agents of unpredictability, uncalculated by modernism, thus revindicating the specific potentials of the multiple spaces—geographic as well as mental—by which the application of those doctrines has been inhabited.

“Mutations in utopia are made evident in pieces that point to the filtrations of hazard and imagination into the original physical places of modernism and its historical revision. One can understand this shifting utopian thinking and its current ghostly presence by assimilating it to the notion of ‘the mind as a territory undergoing constant change’, as proposed by Robert Smithson: ‘One’s mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason. Vast moving faculties occur in this geological miasma, and they move in the most physical way.'”
—Press release, “Customary Beauty,” Galerie Mor Charpentier website.