The Devil Is in the Details
“The Devil is in the Details” includes 25 works by 11 internationally recognized artists who share a common experience of dealing with historical issues and historiographic methodology as part of their practices, which have become an ever-present and driving force in contemporary art. The exhibition overlaps geographically and chronologically with artists of different generations from Germany, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Argentina, Belgium, Colombia, Haiti, Peru, and USA, most of them emigrants who have found new places for the development of their careers.
The exhibition departs from the famous proverb “God is in the details” that has been attributed to such prominent figures as Aby Warburg and Mies van der Rohe. Warburg, who is widely considered the founder of modern art historiography on account of his well known Mnemosyne Atlas, use the proverb as his motto and his intended meaning was to highlight the importance of hard labor for reaching one’s goal as an art historian. On the other hand, Georges Didi-Huberman offers a more in depth interpretation of Warburg’s phrase and dialecticizes it in the following way: “a little devil always nestles in the (Warburg) atlas: that is, in the space of ‘intimate and secret liaisons’ between things or between figures. A devilish genie lies somewhere in the imaginative construction of the ‘correspondences’ and the ‘analogies’ between each particular detail.” As the curator of the exhibition Jesus Fuenmayor says, “I want this tribute to engage the famous proverb in its inverted sense: ‘The devil is in the details’ pretends to point towards those details’ appearances in a work of art that unexpectedly allow viewers to comprehend the work (and the history) in a different way, even when this reading betrays our expectations or completely twists a work’s initial intention.” Fuenmayor’s intends to draw attention to what Roland Barthes used to call the “Punctum”, that detail in an image that escapes its own structure, “shooting out like an ‘arrow’ towards the viewer”, as Barthes posited it.
The artists selected for this exhibition have turned to the representation of history not just as material itself but also as means by which to criticize how history is constructed. They are not just interested in the past tense or simply reviving archival strategies, but in putting the past in relation to the present and the future, creating overlapping temporalities that bring disparate moments together. With their constant recourse to montage, collage, assemblage and other politically loaded artistic gestures, the artists in this exhibition demonstrate how much room remains open for debate, dialogue and speech; sometimes we just need to pay attention to the details.
