CAF and Mercantil present exhibition Five Latin American Artists

(Caracas, March 23, 2006).- As part of the activities in favor of the dissemination of Latin American creative activities, the Andean Development Corporation (CAF) joins with Mercantil to offer the public a show that brings together five artists from the Latin American region. This event marks the start of exhibition season in 2006 in the CAF Gallery in Avenida Luis Roche in Altamira.

CAF President & CEO Enrique García said that "this exhibition, held with Mercantil a financial institution with 80 years of history and tradition in banking in Venezuela - is part of the CAF effort to transmit the current trends in art in the region; so it is an honor to give space to these expressions which, with imagination and creativity, expand our traditional way of capturing the environment and show us new horizons and cultural challenges in Latin America."

As García explained, the works on show contribute a reflection on urgent themes that have concerned humanity throughout history, "topics that maintain their validity and which strongly influence our epoch." About the creators

Miguel Ángel Ríos, Tunga, María Fernanda Cardoso, José Antonio Hernández Diez and Javier Téllez are outstanding Latin American exponents of the new plastic tendencies of universal art, whose works have been exhibited and recognized in international biennials and in the museums of America, Asia and Europe.

Miguel Ángel Ríos is Argentinian, born in Catamarca. He received his early artistic training in the National Fine Arts Academy and in the universities of Tucumán and Buenos Aires. He has been recognized on the international scene since the 1980s, when he began to develop a series of works related to maps, the translocation of the cartographic idea.

Tunga belongs to the generation of Brazilian artists related to neo-concretism, influenced by the work of Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. He began his artistic career in the 1970s and is now considered one of Brazil’s most important artists. He works with a variety of media, such as sculpture, video performances and installations, revising the discourses of the art and the great Latin American stories from a stance that attempts to understand perceptive and unconscious mechanisms.

María Fernanda Cardoso is one of Colombia's most recognized contemporary artists on the international scene. Her work is marked by the freedom with which she approaches the material and the accumulation of natural and fabricated elements taken from the environment, which come together in artistic forms where she explores notions as complex as survival, violence, life and death.

José Antonio Hernández-Diez is one of the Venezuelan artists with most projection on the contemporary artistic scene. He began to show his works in the late 1980s and since then has participated in numerous shows.

Lastly, the Venezuelan Javier Téllez focuses his interest on questioning the institutional orders established around art and madness. This time he presents the video-installation León de Caracas, in which four policemen carry a stuffed lion in a procession through a Caracas barrio. The soundtrack that accompanies the images is the version of Popule Meus written by José Ángel Lamas written for the Caracas Cathedral performed there without interruption every Easter since it was composed at the end of the colonial era.