world where such test cases might be rescaled and repurposed.4 This philosophy of the object, and of making more generally, also echoes the Bauhaus exercises that López cites as a reference point.5 This particular genealogy ties his practice both to the mythos of European modernism and its universalist aspirations, as well as to the ways in which these concepts were reconceived and repurposed diversely by a range of artists across Latin America (including Clark) and in López’s adopted home of New York, by artists such as Eva Hesse. Notably, López expresses fatigue with an enduring narrative—in contemporary art, in art historical scholarship, and in other academic fields—of modernism’s failure in Latin America. The utopian dream, coded via geometric abstraction, either failed to transplant organically, or, alternatively, revealed its hollowness when confronted with local political and economic conditions that it failed to transform. López’s work formulates a return to the seedlings of modernism’s proposals—what we might call their embryonic plasticity and their potential for intercultural portability. They are humble propositions in the forms of objects and situations—open and contingent. When I met with López at his studio, a typical conversion from a site of industry to a site of artmaking in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, he was quick to note the particularities of making work in New York compared to doing so in Bogotá. For instance, he notes the streamlined protocols of contracting New York fabricators with whom he collaborates in producing furniture and displays for the presentations of his drawings and objects, compared to the artisanal, highly specialized contributions of his earlier partners in Bogotá.6 Indeed, he is attuned to the cultural differences that might inform the way in which works of art are produced as well as the particular materials and techniques to which one has access in a given place— an unevenness that gestures to the persistent asymmetries of our ostensibly “global” present.
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See amongst others Cornelia Butler and Luis Pérez-Oramas, Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014). López, conversation with the author. Ibid.