Artist, Armando Andrade Tudela: My name is Armando Andrade Tudela. I'm a Peruvian artist that lives in Lyon, France.
You are looking at Camión, which is a work that I made in 2003. The work is a collection of different slides in which you basically see different designs that have been painted on trucks. The designs are interesting because they seem to be in a conversation with geometrical abstraction. But they’re also transformations of logo types and different icons that we see in the street. You see these trucks in landscapes that is the coastline of Peru.
As I was working outside Peru, I started understanding that there were holes in the official modernist narrative in Peru. One of them was that the impulse to tell your stories is stronger than to not tell your story.
Narrator: Though abstraction represents an important chapter in the history of art, it's most closely associated with the United States and Europe. In his work, Tudela looks for expressions of abstract art in the everyday surroundings of Latin America.
Armando Andrade Tudela: What I found with Camión is that actually there were these forms of geometrical abstraction, but they were not visible in the same places. So you will see something that will look like minimalism, but you will see it on a truck and not in a gallery.
I think the first version that I did of this piece was through digital projection, and there was something about the temporality of the image that didn't work. The slides projection allows you to put that work into a discussion, and once that work is placed in that discussion, what you are seeing is a different thing. That's the reason why I took the trouble to transform the digital files into 35 millimeter, to be able to introduce it into a historical conversation.