Cuchillo
Eric Rivera Barbeito
Mixed media on paper
7.5 x 9.875 inches
2021
Statement from the artist:
"Cuchillo and Pared both belong to a series of drawings that convey a fragmented synthesis of information through a span of time. Both are products of a consideration of recurrent imagery in my work and how the meaning of said imagery can be manipulated by the context it is put in. In Cuchillo, the cropping of a painting of my grandfather’s hands in the act of peeling an orange imbues it with a sense of violence that together with other symbols, such as a paper airplane or a bitcoin miner, hint at forms of structural violence within my native Puerto Rico, such as the exodus of the island’s population and the influx of United Statesian cryptocurrency evangelists seeking tax advantaged status in the island, benefiting from the emptying archipelago.
Pared similarly makes use of the same process as the one employed with Cuchillo, albeit with intentional rashness, dismantling motifs in my body of work into a plane of abstraction. In this case, the procedural violence of tearing imagery into an unrecognizable form rids the drawing of any of its original intent, replacing it with a semblance of its former state."
