“4th San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial”

Steeped in the tension of Puerto Rico’s financial crisis, the physical dispersion of art into public space and the wholesale impact of economic and governmental breakdown characterize the 4th San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial. Presenting works from a variety of media that are all conceptually rooted in the conditions of printmaking—matrices, reliefs, mark making, and broad modes of dissemination—many of the triennial’s exhibitions are spread across the island, from the streets of San Juan to remote regions. Its most public project registers the contemporary spirit of decentralization not only spatially but also in the politics of the work: For Puerto Rican Master Printers, 2014, the young artist collective Printmakers by Printmakers pays homage to the legendary master printmakers of the island by wheat-pasting their life-size woodcut portraits throughout the city.

During opening events at the Arsenal de la Marina Española, one of the triennial’s central sites, some galleries were still awaiting the arrival of certain works. Several projects exploring site-specificity and questions about how global forces are felt on a local level flanked such voids. In a dark corner of the venue’s colonial building is Nicolás Robbio’s Puerto Rico, 6 AM, 2015, a sparse sculptural installation including a drinking glass, a magnifying glass, and overhead projectors whose refractions chart patterns that the blazing sun makes in the space as it enters through cracks in a worn door. In Karlo Andrei Ibarra’s performative installation Remnants, 2011, a tattoo artist inscribes passages from NAFTA on green plantains. Nearby, Alicia Villareal presents a grid of children’s desks bearing silk-screened maps and jigsaw-cut incisions in Engraving the Territory, 2009. In the context of this exhibition, the wood’s disturbing fault lines comment on the unsustainable fissures in national institutions and profit-driven geopolitics that continue to plague the island.