ACRE is pleased to announce Fixing the Baroque at ACRE Projects, Carlos Salazar-Lermont’s second solo exhibition in Chicago, curated by Inés Arango-Guingue.

Fixing the Baroque brings together the two main bodies of work Salazar-Lermont has developed since 2016, the year he migrated to the United States. Here, these two research lines intertwine, and their intersections become apparent.

The first body of work reflects on migration, particularly the Venezuelan diaspora, insisting on the use of the arepa and of mylar emergency blankets as symbolic and expressive materials of displacement and exile. The second, rooted in performance, examines the enduring influence of Catholic values in Latin American societies, often through the reimagining of Baroque religious iconography.

The works in Fixing the Baroque—spanning performance and video installation—highlight the unsuspected parallels between the Baroque’s preoccupation with chiaroscuro, drama, and mortality, and the contemporary realities of migration in the United States.

We invite you to join us for the opening reception Carlos Salazar-Lermont: Fixing the Baroque on Friday, November 7 from 6 – 9 pm or during gallery open hours on Mondays and Wednesdays, 11am – 3pm, and by appointment.

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Carlos Salazar-Lermont is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans performance art, video, photography, installation, and print media. Central to his work is an exploration of performativity and socially engaged art, with a particular focus on the complexities of Post-colonial identity and cultural heritage in Latin America.

His work has been exhibited in numerous international events, including Experiencias de la Carne (Lima and Trujillo, Peru), Soap Box Sessions (London), PAEkort #14 (Rotterdam, Netherlands), and Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival (Chicago, US). He has participated in several key performance art festivals in Venezuela, such as ID Performance, Encuentro de Arte Corporal, and Fugaz: Feria de Performance del Estado Lara, among others. In 2014, he founded P3 Plataforma Para Performance, an organization dedicated to promoting the creation, research, and education of Performance Art. The following year, he established the International Performance Art Biennial of Caracas, further cementing his role as a key figure in Latin American performance art.
Salazar-Lermont holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Washington University in St. Louis (2022), where he received the prestigious Danforth Scholarship, and a Dual MA in Arts Administration & Policy and Modern and Contemporary Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2019), supported by the New Artists Society Scholarship. He also earned a BFA in Sculpture from UNEARTE (2012) and a Technical High School degree in Fine Arts (2005).

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Inés Arango-Guingue is a Colombian curator and writer. In recent years, her research has focused on art and philosophy that acknowledges the social power of the unknown, the opaque, and the illegible.

She is co-curator of Learning Together: Art Education and Community at the University of Illinois – Chicago’s Gallery 400, a major exhibition centering the progressive art pedagogy of a diverse group of Chicago artist educators from the mid-1960s through the 2010s. In addition, she organized exhibitions at the Mildred’s Lane Complex(ity) in Narrowsburg, New York; Museo del Banco de la Republica in Bogotá; Flora Ars + Natura in Bogotá; and Casona de Linea in Havana, Cuba. She was a 2023 Art Table fellow and a 2022 Abakanowicz fellow at SAIC’s Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice. She is a contributing author to the upcoming book Tuning Calder’s Clouds, to be published by The Calder Foundation and the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center.

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