From Venice to José Ignacio: Eduardo Cardozo brings his acclaimed work "Latente" to Uruguay.

The latest edition of the Venice Biennale – curated by Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa under the motto “Foreigners Everywhere” – was the stage where Uruguayan artist Eduardo Cardozo literally brought his own studio to the city of canals to create a work that speaks of uprooting, encounter and friendship , as part of the official submission to the Uruguayan Pavilion.

That same exhibition, titled Latent , can be visited until September 7 at the Cervieri Monsuárez Foundation in José Ignacio, a cultural event in a resort that rarely vibrates outside of the summer season.

“We always carry our history with us when we go to another place,” says Cardozo (Montevideo, 1965). “But we also have the responsibility to understand the place we're arriving at . It's not just about being welcomed; it's also about being curious about the other.”

With this in mind, the artist moved three walls of his studio in the Cordón neighborhood of Montevideo to Venice in 2024 , using the stacco technique, which is often used to transport murals.

The operation wasn't simply material. This act of "foreignness"—a Uruguayan wall inhabiting a Venetian wall —derived from a poetic interplay that unfolds in the exhibition in three core themes: "The Nude," "The Garments," and "The Veil." The nude is precisely that wall, those walls, uprooted from their original location, bearing the traces of what they witnessed.

“ That wall contains all my experience : essays, brushstrokes, color tests, notes. And also the experience of all the people who lived there before, in that house from the early 20th century. It's a piece of Montevideo that has stayed with me, with all its history, right up to the place where the meeting took place. I dismantled my studio to build something else,” the artist explains.

The vestments, meanwhile, reinterpret Jacopo Tintoretto's enormous Mannerist painting "Paradise" (1588), now housed in the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid . In this immense painting—measuring nearly five meters—the Venetian artist illustrates the coronation of the Virgin, inspired by Dante's Paradise, amidst clouds, angels, cherubs, and the Blessed.

Cardozo proposes a dialogue with that paradise , but this time with dyed and molded canvases that hang in the air, without the bodies of the original – as if floating – in a kind of chromatic dance that seeks to dialogue with the light, drama and movement of the original.

A technical discovery made during the restoration of that work inspired the Uruguayan artist: Tintoretto painted the nude bodies first and then added clothing . “I was interested in that intimate nudity, that process revealed by the X-ray analysis,” Cardozo explains. So he decided to work only with clothing, the garments floating like specters, suggesting absence.

Meanwhile, "the veil" was made with the same fabrics used to move the wall of his studio , a threaded membrane that goes from floor to ceiling inside the exhibition hall, uniting both universes.

“This glaze offers us a liminal space; a transition between the bareness of the artist's wall and the clothing of Tintoretto's characters ,” says the exhibition's curator, Elisa Valerio.

Unlike other pavilions in Venice that raised their voices with explicit discourses on migration, gender, or indigenous peoples, the Uruguayan pavilion opted for an eloquent silence , a space that, as Valerio points out, "reveals itself in layers, with a careful look."

Latente 's return to Uruguay closes one cycle and opens another . In the foundation's basement, "The Tempest" is being added, a new collective installation conceived by Cardozo with his friends Álvaro Zinno and Fabián Oliver.

The work combines columns of branches, cables, and books that rise like a tangled forest of sounds and shadows, as mysterious as it is unsettling. "This installation seeks to connect us with the unconscious that makes all creation possible, an unconscious that takes on a different form in each of these artists," Valerio notes.

The Cervieri Monsuárez Foundation (FCM), located at the entrance to José Ignacio Street, is one of the latest projects conceived by the prestigious architect Rafael Viñoly (1944–2023). Its most unique feature is the curved wall built with enormous stone blocks hand-carved by Peruvian master craftsmen, as if the whole had been extracted directly from Machu Picchu. The exhibition can be visited there until September 7, with free admission.

In dialogue with this exhibition, the Sur gallery, located in La Barra (Punta del Este), presents Eduardo Cardozo: Winter Solstice, a brief retrospective , which brings together a group of works with a bright and colorful palette that complement the proposal.