This was a new-figuration show with a difference, exploring as it did the Pan-American manifestations of Neo-Expressionism. For the two-part exhibition, recently held at the Center for Inter-American Relations and the City Gallery, curator John Stringer chose 19 artists from 11 Latin American countries and one from Canada to prove that expressive brush-strokes and emotive subject matter are alive and well in an area usually neglected by New York curators, critics and dealers.
Jorge Tacla's works are striking in their obsessive intensity. The large painting on display here (similar to others recently on view at the Nohra Haime Gallery) explores the Chilean artist's preoccupation with initiation rites involving mutilation, clitorectomy and the disemboweling of elephants. His fascination with self-mutilation has recurred throughout his career in countless self-portraits showing Tacla crucified, his eyes gouged out and his head split by an ax and punctured by nails and knives. Asked about his obsession with violence, Tacla said he could find no other way to express his tenderness.
