For several years Amado Azar has been exploring the visual languages of Modernism, inasmuch they incarnated an ideology regarding social transformation and a Utopian view of the future. The works in this exhibition, Lucid Dream, crystallize much of these explorations, layering references to modernist architecture and graphic abstractions over allusions to political circumstances in Argentina’s history. Azar is interested in the articulation of Modernism in Latin America, the way this aesthetic and ideological movement encountered the specific sociopolitical circumstances of the region.

Azar’s working process in developing this exhibition included ongoing conversations with art historian and curator Adriana Lauría. In an accompanying essay, she contextualizes Azar’s interests within the concept of Trans-Modernity, which she describes as “implying the awareness of how European colonization of the Americas forged the characteristics and conditions for the possibility for modernism, along with the development of capitalism and the geopolitical, scientific and spiritual transformations which were imposed from the centers of economic power to the rest of the world.”

The exhibition includes works in different media —watercolors and oil on paper, ceramic sculptures, collages, silkscreens, video— which together build a non-linear narrative around Azar’s fascination with both, the formal beauty of Modernist tropes and its historical implications.