Marfa/Puerto Viejo

This series of eight paintings is a visual essay on the connections between two geographically and socially different contexts: West Texas and northern Chile. Each pair of paintings compares a scene from Donald Judd’s Minimalist sculptures in the West Texas landscape of Marfa, Texas with a summer community on the coast of Puerto Viejo in the north of Chile. These apparently similar structures and landscapes are in fact worlds apart. Donald Judd bought large sections of the town and environs of Marfa to create an isolated Minimalist paradise for himself as an escape from the New York art world. By contrast, the structures in Puerto Viejo were erected by people living in a nearby town, who construct makeshift illegal summer homes by the beach. Guilisasti (whose installation La Vigilia is on view in America/Americas on this floor) uses the formal similarity of geometric forms in a remote landscape to ask one of the oldest questions in art history: Does context affect how we read an image? In these paintings the artist addresses the connections and distinctions between North and South America, an issue that runs throughout the Blanton’s modern and contemporary collections.