URUGUAY PAVILION at the Biennale Arte 2024

Latente is the title of the Uruguayan Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Presented by artist Eduardo Cardozo, under the curatorship of Elisa Valerio and with the collaboration of Álvaro Zinno, was unanimously selected by the jury to be exhibited at the Uruguayan Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2024, between April 20 and November 24, 2024.

Facundo de Almeida
Commissioner (MEC-DNC)
Elisa Valerio
Curator
Eduardo Cardozo
Artist
Álvaro Zinno
Collaborator
Mechtild Endhardt
Restoration Adviser
EDUARDO CARDOZO (1965, MONTEVIDEO)
Visual artist. He graduated from the National School of Fine Arts of Uruguay in 1990 from the
workshop of Ernesto Arostegui. He attended the School of Architecture, was granted a scholarship
to study printmaking with Luis Camnitzer in Valdottavo (Italy, 1993), and took courses on video (El
ojo disidente [The Dissident Eye]) and philosophy of art with Andrea Carriquiry. Among other
distinctions, he has twice won the first prize at the National Salon (2012 and 2004), the
Bicentennial Painting Award (2011), the Municipal Biennale of Montevideo (1994) and the Paul
Cézanne Prize (1991), which earned him a scholarship to study in France. Cardozo has participated
in multiple biennales, including the first and fifth Mercosur Biennale in Porto Alegre (Brazil, 1997
and 2005), the Cuenca Biennale (Ecuador, 2001), the Do ut do Biennale La morale dei singoli in
Pompeii (Italy, 2018-2019), and the Beijing Biennale (China, 2021). Since the late 80s, he has held
dozens of solo and group exhibitions in Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, the United States,
Germany, Spain, Austria, France, and China. Among his solo shows, Rauschen, held in the Museo
Nacional de Artes Visuales (2012, Uruguay), and Sin fechar [Undated], housed by Fundación
Atchugarry (2013, Uruguay), stand out. His work is part of important public and private collections
in Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Germany, France, and the United States. In 2021, Cardozo did
an artist residency at Portal de Luz in Pueblo Edén, where he produced Humano [Human]. In
Uruguay, Cardozo is represented by Galería Sur, which will house his next solo show, La
celebración de la pintura [The Celebration of Painting]. He lives and works in Montevideo,
Uruguay.
ELISA VALERIO (1990, MONTEVIDEO)
Holds a master's degree in Advanced Studies in Art History from the Universitat de Barcelona
(Spain), with a master's thesis focusing on the connection between mediation and curatorial
practices. She completed her master's internship at the Coordination of Educational Projects at
the Fundació Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, Spain). Additionally, Valerio is a Bachelor of Arts in
Literature who graduated from the Universidad de la República (Uruguay) and completed a
Diploma in Editing at the Universidad CLAEH (Uruguay). Since 2019, she has been working free-
lance as a curator, arts manager, producer, and journalist in visual arts-related projects in
Uruguay. She has collaborated in various roles with different national institutions, including the
Ministry of Education and Culture, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry (MACA), the
Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo (EAC), the Museo José Gurvich, the Xippas gallery, the Diana
Saravia Gallery, and ESTE ARTE. She regularly writes about visual arts for ArtNexus (Colombia-
United States) and la diaria (Uruguay). Since 2020, she has been the coordinator of the
International Art Fair and Cultural Summit ESTE ARTE, held in Punta del Este. In addition, she
advises artists to assist them in their career development and professionalization and teaches
courses on mediation and the art market. She lives and works in Uruguay.
ÁLVARO ZINNO (1958, MONTEVIDEO)
Artist and photographer. He studied drawing and painting with Clever Lara in 1980. In 1986, he
took a photogravure course with David Finkbeiener at the New York University, and in 1988, a
video art course taught by John Sturgeon at the Museum of Plastic and Visual Arts. He holds a
degree in Structural Civil Engineering from the Universidad de la República. In 1987, he received a
Fulbright Scholarship for a photography project in New York. Since the 1980s, he has exhibited his
work in solo and group shows in Uruguay, Argentina, the United States, Belgium, Mexico, Cuba,
and Chile. His work is part of national and international collections. Zinno's art has earned him
multiple awards and distinctions. In 1988, he won the Graciela Paternó Award in the Pan Am
Competition, which was exhibited at the Museo de Arte Americano in Maldonado. In 1991, he
received the 500th Anniversary Award, organized by the Ibero-American Cooperation Institute. In
1996, he was awarded the first prize Citibank at the Museo de Arte Americano in Maldonado and
the first prize in the 100th Anniversary Contest organized by the newspaper El Día. In 2006, he won
the Broadcast Design Award for an editing piece of Warner Brothers' Smallville. Since 2000, he has
worked as a post-producer, advertising director, and director of photography. He lives and works
in Uruguay.
LATENT. On The Curatorial Project
by Elisa Valerio
Latent is an immersive piece which establishes a relational act between two distant painters:
Uruguay's Eduardo Cardozo and Venice's Tintoretto. This conversation comprises three instances:
the nude, the vestments and the veil. The nude, on one hand, is the transportation of Cardozo's
studio wall to Venice by means of the stacco technique. The vestments, on the other hand, is an
interpretation by the Uruguayan artist of one of the rough sketches for Tintoretto's Paradise. And,
lastly, the veil is a length of cloth resulting from sawing together scraps of the lightweight
unbleached cotton used for transporting the studio wall. Thus, a counterpoint emerges between
Uruguay and Italy, the south and the north, Cardozo's work and his reimagining of Tintoretto's
painting.
Firstly, Cardozo decided to put on display the skin of his studio and transported the surface layers
of his studio walls via the stacco technique. This way, he reveals his most personal side as an artist,
hence, the nude, the space where he conceives and produces his oeuvre. These walls hint at their
use and changes over time; they attest to and are physical and aesthetical proof of Cardozo's work
process and the evolution of his ideas and artistic research. This cracked wall reveals the fragility
of the artist and his work, exposing him to his uprootedness; there is no such thing as an artist
without a context, without a framework that contains him. In this prismatic room of clean, hard
lines, Cardozo's studio walls are no longer enveloping, engrafted instead on a single wall in a linear
fashion, their otherness highlighted because of the change of location. As a result, the wall
becomes an immigrational act in Venice: a Uruguayan wall inhabiting a Venetian wall.
Secondly, like a traveler, Cardozo journeyed across space and time to delve into his destination:
Venice. It was during this research process that he came across one of the two rough sketches of
Tintoretto's Paradise. This massive canvas, located in the hall of Madrid's Museo Nacional
Thyssen-Bornemisza, underwent a long restoration process between 2012 and 2013. It was
precisely this process that Cardozo found captivating. Therefore, the Uruguayan decided to
remake the painting's characters' vestments. Consequently, he performs a volumetric
reinterpretation on lightweight unbleached cotton, canvas and linen, using oil painting and acrylic.
Cardozo strips the painting of its subject and content, solely reprising its pictorial language: the
shapes, the gestures, the light, the color.
His reimagining, rather than seeking to mimic the original piece in a different format, extracts a
methodology from it, a certain set of gestures characteristic of the Venetian. On these pieces of
cloth, Cardozo recapture the feeling of entanglement and twisting typical of Tintoretto's budding
Mannerism. These sets of cloths appear like highly fluid and harmonic floating cumuli. The
Venetian colors dance in an intense conversation of organic shapes. The edges of the cloth fade
into one another. This way, Cardozo dresses Tintoretto's characters again, covering their nudity.
Lastly, a veil hangs in the middle of the room. A fine, translucent length of cloth made up of scraps
of the lightweight unbleached cotton used to transport the artist's studio walls sewn together. A
gauze-like sensation prevails, revealing as much as it conceals. This veiling provides a liminal space,
a transition from the bareness of the studio walls and Tintoretto's characters' clothing. It is, in
turn, a hindrance to the encounter between these artists and their work. It poses a game of
seduction between the other two pieces. As in a courtship, these scraps allow us to unravel the
different pieces, which gradually reveal themselves in the dim light. This semi-permeable
membrane invites us to learn about the artist and, through his reflection, learn about ourselves.
In this relational act, Car