Juan Pablo Langlois: Afterwards no one will remember
Curated by Paula Solimano

September 12 – October 21, 2018

Cindy Rucker Gallery is pleased to present Afterwards no one will remember, Chilean artist Juan Pablo Langlois’s first solo show in the United States. The exhibition is a selection of sculptures and videos from the early 1980s and 2000s.

In Chile during the years preceding the 1973 military coup, and throughout the right-wing dictatorship and return to democracy, Juan Pablo Langlois Vicuña (b. 1936, Santiago, Chile) has directed his shy, yet powerful gaze onto his everyday surroundings, translating it into a silent, solitary practice in his modest studios in Paine and Santiago. Employing a wide range of materials—all of which are low-cost, common, and accessible—he has created a body of work that is both diverse and remarkably consistent.

In Afterwards no one will remember, nude lovers ache in desire, pain, and exhaustion, yet stand motionless and undisturbed. Made of tempera, wire, and paper, they appear more crude and real than our own flesh. They’ve been displaced from the margins and exposed in plain sight, forcing us to witness their fall—into despair, into holes, into each other. Then, a series of videos captures the destruction of other sculptural figures.

Langlois’s characters are lost to the waves, violent passion, and chaos. But why does he give birth to these fictional creatures, if he insists on sentencing them to death? Already in 1984, Langlois wrote of himself, “Vicuña no longer holds faith in the importance of art, and all of his work is the commitment to that belief.” After creating his videos in 2011—his first exploration of the medium—he said: “I got excited by the act of destroying.”

For over fifty years, Juan Pablo Langlois has explored the intersection of body and identity. In his seminal 1969 installation C uerpos Blandos (Soft Bodies), Langlois invaded Chile’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes with a 500-foot-long plastic sleeve filled with newspaper, surrounding the cold, smooth neoclassical sculptures and pillars with what looked like a large, pulsating intestine. After going through the second floor, the serpentine sleeve hung out the window and embraced a neighboring palm tree. What began from a place of restlessness and boredom became a milestone, as it positioned itself as the first large-scale installation in Chilean art history. Years later, Langlois’s approach equally turns on the sociological, anthropological, and emotional.

 Juan Pablo Langlois Vicuña (b. 1936, Santiago, Chile) is widely considered one of Chile’s most important contemporary artists. Throughout his fifty-year career, his work has been featured in group shows in Latin America and in the United States, and in 2012, he was given a retrospective at Santiago’s cultural center Matucana 100, titled J uan Pablo Langlois V. (1969-2012)  . His artistic oeuvre has been studied by important scholars such as Andrea Giunta and Ana María Risco, and currently forms part of important public and private collections, including but not limited to Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Santiago, Chile), Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Caracas, Venezuela), and Princeton University.

Paula Solimano is a Brooklyn-based curator and writer originally from Santiago, Chile. She has researched and collaborated with Juan Pablo Langlois Vicuña since 2017, and currently contributes articles and reviews that address inequality in the art world for the Spanish-language contemporary art portal Artishock  . Solimano is also an editor and translator of other disciplines, such as economics and poetry.

“Juan Pablo Langlois: Afterwards no one will remember”, The Brooklyn Rail, Colin Edgington, November 15, 2018. Download PDF.

“Juan Pablo Langlois: Afterwards no one will remember”, Artishock Revista, Cristóbal Lehyt, October 5, 2018. Download PDF.