A.llegades

Attention to detail matters. In contemporary-art spaces, it is often the small touches that make the difference — the care given to the works, but also the invisible through-lines that draw them together. In A.llegades at the FOFA Gallery, the dried plantain leaves on the title wall that spell the names of the exhibition and the participating artists are an example of this type of intention. For curator María Andreína Escalona De Abreu, these deliberate moments evoke a desire to generate proximity, inviting the viewer to look closer.

A.llegades takes the concept of arrival to ask how Latinx artists from various cultural backgrounds can coexist in their respective diasporic identities, coalescing as first- and second-generation immigrants on the unceded territory of Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal. In the main exhibition space, Juan Pablo Hernández Gutiérrez’s No se ve (The business, J balvin) (2023), a monumental piece composed of a bright patchwork of yellow, red, and blue bootleg soccer jerseys, reigns over one of the walls. Gutiérrez appropriated an image of the Colombian reggaeton singer J Balvin, printing it on this dazzling textile surface and then attaching it to a perfunctory mechanism that allows the fabric to be rolled up and down, echoing the liveliness of South and Central American football stadiums.