Carlos Llobet Montealegre, Urban Composition
by :
Rachel Lynn Johnson
Carlos Llobet Montealegre, Urban Composition (2019). Photo: Bryan Lee/El Museo
In Urban Composition (2019), part of Costa Rican artist Carlos Llobet Montealegre’s exhibition The “Old” New Normal on view at El Museo this summer, a group of people are shown in their daily life. A boy looks out at you with an expression of sadness. On the ground, an elderly man leans against a green bag while holding a purple one. A little girl almost touches the purple bag, her chin pointed down and her eyes closed. A motherly figure looks down toward the girl. More women and another elderly man crowd this intergenerational scene foreshadowing what life for the youth will someday be. Physical figures and bags overlap each other, but the figures themselves are all rendered from the same perspective, making for an uncanny visual experience. Behind them is a background of spray-painted graffiti: a happy face in blue, a capitalized “NOPE” in yellow.
All of these characters–drawn from the memory of Costa Rica’s farmer’s markets–are brought to life in the form of human-scaled relief prints, their bags projecting from the wall, cut and sewn from various spray-painted materials. Despite the bright colors and playful visual motifs, the work is a testament to the drudgery of life for all generations, a notion reflected in the artist’s own process–according to Montealegre, each figure required 15 hours to carve and there are 24 unique figures presented in the exhibition, each printed twice. Montealegre’s artistic labor, then, is an act of empathy and solidarity with his subjects, who are presented here as static, unable to extricate themselves from a situation which–according to the despairing looks on their faces–is unbearable. Whether or not this is an effective strategy for drawing recognition to a political or moral issue will largely be up to the sentiments of each individual viewer.
Rachel Lynn Johnson is a graduate student at the University at Buffalo’s Innovative Writing Program. She is a member at the Western New York Book Arts Center.
Image: Carlos Llobet Montealegre, Urban Composition, 2019. Photo: Bryan Lee/El Museo
Carlos Llobet Montealegre, The “Old” New Normal
May 3 – 25, 2019
El Museo
91 Allen Street, Buffalo NY 14202
