Entretiens sur l'art Armando Andrade Tudela
Born in 1975 in Lima, Armando Andrade Tudela began by studying art at the Pontifícia Universidad Católica in Lima (1993-2000), where he also taught (2001-2003). Then he left Peru for Europe, studying at the Royal College of Art in London and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. He then lived in Berlin for a few years before moving to Lyon, France, where he taught at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts.
Armando has thus encountered and confronted many teachings in art, corresponding to as many different methodologies and aesthetic conceptions. His international career is typical of artists of his generation, as is his reflection on a plural modernity, inspired by his experience of various contexts, tying him to an international trend preponderant in the 2000s that responded to an urgent need: to conceive a history of modernity and modernism from a perspective that was postcolonial and no longer strictly Western. Tudela participated in one of the seminal exhibitions on the subject: Modernologies (MACBA, Barcelona, 2009), reflecting several decades of research on the meaning and scope of a “modern project”, inseparable from the cultural and political situations in which it was embodied. For ten years, Tudela continued to explore a hybrid modern heritage, searching the unconscious and often traumatic undercurrents of a history of forms, in relation to the history of his country and of the Latin American continent. As shown by his recent solo exhibitions at the CRAC Alsace and at the CA2M in Madrid, the artist is ever-more freely and experimentally developing a varied formal and conceptual body of work, taking the form of sculpture, installation, film, drawing and collage.
Today the artist is returning to his early training, creating a project that, as always in his art, combines research with the production of works. Fine arts teaching methods in Lima, a combination of modernism and Catholicism (which can seem strange at first glance), were asserted like an aesthetic dogma for more than forty years, “extending beyond the university to become an ideology of contemporary art production and reception in Peruvian society”. Tudela compares this education “with other educational and doctrinaire systems from the history of Peru”, particularly those of the 16th-century Inquisition. This research touches upon questions that have haunted the artist since his early days: which ideology “supports” which aesthetic conception or artistic methodology, with properties that are theoretically liberating? Which forgotten, unthought-of ghosts haunt our aesthetic collections and bodies? Without, of course, seeking to fully answer these questions, nor to offer explanations, the artist probes a history, memory and imagination of violence and constraint, always keeping his sights on the form – a form perceived through the concrete, if infinitely variable, prism of its regimes of production.
The artist’s current research will provide the framework for our interview, in which we will look back on a vast body of work. In the process, Armando Andrade Tudela will introduce us to surprising artistic genealogies, as well as artists who are little-known or unknown in France.
