Punta del Este has always been an attractive geography for artistic activity, where summer free time favored a deeper dialogue with viewers, in galleries, fairs and exhibition centers.
In the last decade, this dialogue has gained formality and breadth. A movement that translates into increasingly more samples important works of the region’s leading artists and notable international visitorsand is a central activity for those who spend their holidays on the coast of Uruguay.
One of the Argentine artists with the greatest projection abroad, Gabriel Chaile from Tucumán, is the main protagonist of the 2025 season, in one of José Ignacio’s new art spaces: the Cervieri Monsuárez Foundation. There you can visit, from January 6, “The young people remembered their songs”, the “site-specific” project that Chaile and his team set up in their facilities, under the curation of Pablo León de la Barra. An exhibition that around a central sculpture recreates a landscape, its inhabitants and the stories that its memory does not want to stop telling us.
The shapes
Created in clay, Gabriel Chaile’s immense sculptures reformulate the ceramic pieces of indigenous peoplesin the cultural and geographical area of the place where the artist was born: Tucumán. On a super-human scale, each piece is imposed as a link of historical knowledge that is transmitted from generation to generation and is an image of the resistance against the discrimination and mistreatment imposed on the populations that inhabit that territory, since times prior to colonization.
“The mud, which also has the same color as their skin, brown, serves as a material that shows the fragility of these stories for surviving the official narratives of whiteness, which constantly try to extinguish and make invisible the stories of others,” explains Pablo León de la Barra, curator of the exhibition. Together with him, Chaile also held an important exhibition-performance in the United States, at the Guggenheim Museum, called ‘Travelling Cultural Center’. The young people who played the drums in New York, on that occasion, were also present at the inauguration of Punta del Este, to remember the songs that were forgotten and that must return again and again to memory.
The sculpture “La Yunga” occupies the center of the room. The term refers to the central mountain jungles in the geography of Tucumán. “The jungle is wild,” Chaile describes, “it does not obey a human pattern, but rather its own, autonomous one. So many things happened there at different times. The different times that the earth keeps and the jungle protects them in their own way. The jungle is never still, it moves and the earth moves. Movements bring things from the inside out and reveal to us testimonies from now, yesterday and other times. “The revelation of a grandiose or sinister action that emerges into the present in the form of ceramics from primary cultures, war objects in times of dictatorships.”
In “La Yunga”, the artist pays tribute to the landscape of his province, and also to the tapir, an animal in danger of extinction. On the surface of the sculpture there are stories drawn, testimony of the armed confrontations of the army with the people in the 60s and 70s; battles that are a quote from the work “The execution” of the Tucumán painter Ezequiel Linares.
The walls of the room also have traces of the vegetation of that jungle that hides the wounds that the dictatorship left on its floor. “’La Yunga’ is a warrior sculpture, angry, that has fangs and a ferocious face, but it is also a sculpture that cries and contains pain, which has witnessed innumerable violence against nature, animals and men themselves,” explains Pablo León de la Barra.
The location
The space where “The young people remembered their songs” takes place deserves a special mention. Founded by lawyers Virginia Cervieri and Pablo Monsuárez, the “Cervieri Monsuárez Foundation” set out since its opening, just a year ago, to dedicate itself to the exhibition and dissemination of contemporary Latin American art and integrate Uruguay into the international artistic circuit.
Its headquarters are located in the town of José Ignacio and it is one of the latest designs made by the Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly. Among the peculiarities of its construction, in addition to its perfect harmony with the natural environment, a wall made of stone stands out according to the techniques of ancient Inca craftsmen. To carry it out, 20 specialists traveled especially from Peru. The building has 900 m2 divided into three floors and large windows that offer wonderful views of the sea.
The Andean reminiscences of Viñoly’s design dialogue perfectly with the work of Gabriel Chaile. In their own way, both affirm the presence of local culture and the need to declare, in each creation, the trace of history that contains them.
Image gallery
