Painting Situations: Sigfredo Chacon and Liliana Porter/ ISLAA Artist Initiative showcases the work of two pioneers of Latin American conceptualism: Sigfredo Chacon (b. 1950, Venezuela) and Liliana Porter (b. 1941, Argentina). The curators focus on Chacon's and Porter's emblematic  projects: his Pinturasparlantes (Speaking-paintings) and her Trabajoforzado (Forced Labor) series. In doing so, the exhibition highlights how, despite each artist's deployment of radically different aesthetic strategies, the works on view share a common ambition. Each artist critically comments on the history of art, creating situations that call upon viewers' lived experiences and attention to social contexts. 

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Painting Situations foregrounds Chacon's consistent investigation into how the language of monochrome painting and speech derive from conventions that can be dismantled and reinvented. By exploiting the disjunctions between visual and verbal forms, Chacon's Pinturasparlantes work against the presumed autonomy, conventions, and purity of modernist painting. Chacon began his practice of having his paintings ''speak'' in 1974, whereby he anthropomorphizes painting and complicates speech's communicative function. The exhibition includes four works from this series produced in four specific sites, including Gainesville. 

 

Known for her original work across multiple media, Porter's Trabajoforzado works (begun in 2003) show fictional scenes of physically intensive labor-i.e., to sweep, to chop-that exploit the discrepant scale between a miniature figurine and the size of a represented task. With the blue sand  (read pigment) and bladed instrument of each installation respectively, Porter wields a subtle critique of Yves Klein's monochrome blue paintings and of Lucio Fontana's slashed canvases, opening up midcentury modernism to broader reflections on how gender, class, and power intersect beyond painting's frame. In mining the activity of speech and the activity of labor to question painting's histories, Chacon and Porter each enable creative and conceptual engagements for viewers to approach ''painting'' as a situation in and of the world. 

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Painting Situations is the first exhibition in the series sponsored by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art's (ISLAA) Artist Seminar Initiative, which supports academic institutions in fostering intimate exchanges between students and living artists from Latin America. The exhibition is produced in collaboration with University Galleries and the School of Art+ Art History.