NADA Miami 2020

Until the mid 1990s it was common to assume visual representations underlie reasoning. “Visual mental images” would be invoked in the mind in order to solve every day, basic deductive problems. Or so it was thought. A new wave of contemporary cognitive psychologists (such as Markus Knauff) argues that the groundings of reasoning are not visual, but spatial. The works we would like to present at NADA by Armando Andrade Tudela, William Cordova, Gabriel Acevedo Velarde and Zhivago Duncan could be approached in such a way.

These four artists use an array of medias to represent different ways in which the spatial experience transcends the visual, posing discreet, piercing questions about the flexibility of that border. Furthermore, each one of these artists bends this problematic towards their individual concerns. Mythologies and minimalism collapse in the cryptic work of Armando Andrade Tudela to create powerful, synthetic metaphors in which meaning are tightly bound to the phenomenological viewers’ perceptual experience; the historical takes a political and whimsical edge with William Cordova’s collages and the problematics of sexuality and political representation is depicted in Gabriel Acevedo Velarde’s retinal challenges between parliaments and patterns. Zhivago Duncan addressees representation of the physical and metaphysical giving birth to a line of mystic human structure crossing over to stories of gods and nature of a once harmonious world.