Pérez y Requena’s “Los solteros”
Cover Story, October 2026
Curated by Latitudes and Néstor Delgado Morales, Pérez y Requena’s exhibition “A Parrot, Three Bars, and Gold Teeth” is on view at TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, until 18 October 2026. Among its sixteen new works is “Los solteros” (The Bachelors) (2026), seen here in mid-installation by Isra Pérez. Dozens of galvanised sheet-steel forms hang in a line some eight metres long, as if strung up in a workshop. Some read as calligraphic punctuation marks, others recall a swashbuckler’s cutlass. Many hint at baroque curlicues or ornate limbs, or at extended versions of the Burmester set, those so-called French curves used in technical drafting. If the title is a clue (and of course it is), they also summon the wooden templates of Marcel Duchamp’s “3 Standard Stoppages” (1913-14) and the mannequin-like bachelor figures of “The Large Glass” (1915-23).
Each metal shape copies a different template the artists found in artisans’ workshops in the Santa Cruz and La Laguna areas: guides used by carpenters and furniture makers to shape wood, or by shoemakers to cut leather. These are reproductions of pattern-cutting tools whose purpose was already to produce copies, objects that exist so that other things can be made more-or-less the same. Here the templates, normally left in the workshop and valued only for what they make, become the exhibited work. Once a way of guiding a pencil or a knife along a reliable but imperfect line, they now hang apparently redundant, made obsolete by newer means of production. A row of lonely singles with little hope of reproducing.
Pattern-making and line-tracing recur throughout “A Parrot, Three Bars, and Gold Teeth” as a kind of instinctive methodology. The exhibition follows the curves of risqué comic-book drawings from the 1970s and the organic grid of woven reeds once used as walls. It also echoes sinuous Neo-Mudéjar mouldings from a ruined building in the rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood near the museum. The result is at once modern and premodern, multiple and heterogeneous, drawing its rhythm and rhyme from disparate sources and temporalities. There is an echo of Caroline Levine’s argument in her 2015 book “Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network”. Pattern is a category that travels freely between art and other forms of lived experience. What organises a row of steel curves might once have organised the workshop, shaped by the demands of labour and by shifts in technology and taste. Patterns and connecting lines might shape a visit to a museum as much as sitting on an old wooden chair or walking in a new pair of leather shoes. Pattern here moves with the city itself, cutting through thousands of tiny rituals and everyday norms, repeated but never quite the same, traced within the city and the island and running out into the world.
Each metal shape copies a different template the artists found in artisans’ workshops in the Santa Cruz and La Laguna areas: guides used by carpenters and furniture makers to shape wood, or by shoemakers to cut leather. These are reproductions of pattern-cutting tools whose purpose was already to produce copies, objects that exist so that other things can be made more-or-less the same. Here the templates, normally left in the workshop and valued only for what they make, become the exhibited work. Once a way of guiding a pencil or a knife along a reliable but imperfect line, they now hang apparently redundant, made obsolete by newer means of production. A row of lonely singles with little hope of reproducing.
Pattern-making and line-tracing recur throughout “A Parrot, Three Bars, and Gold Teeth” as a kind of instinctive methodology. The exhibition follows the curves of risqué comic-book drawings from the 1970s and the organic grid of woven reeds once used as walls. It also echoes sinuous Neo-Mudéjar mouldings from a ruined building in the rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood near the museum. The result is at once modern and premodern, multiple and heterogeneous, drawing its rhythm and rhyme from disparate sources and temporalities. There is an echo of Caroline Levine’s argument in her 2015 book “Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network”. Pattern is a category that travels freely between art and other forms of lived experience. What organises a row of steel curves might once have organised the workshop, shaped by the demands of labour and by shifts in technology and taste. Patterns and connecting lines might shape a visit to a museum as much as sitting on an old wooden chair or walking in a new pair of leather shoes. Pattern here moves with the city itself, cutting through thousands of tiny rituals and everyday norms, repeated but never quite the same, traced within the city and the island and running out into the world.
- COVER STORY, OCTOBER 2026
Pérez y Requena’s “Los solteros”
Cover Story, October 2026
Cover Story ArchiveCurated by Latitudes and Néstor Delgado Morales, Pérez y Requena’s exhibition “A Parrot, Three Bars, and Gold Teeth” is on view at TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, until 18 October 2026. Among its sixteen new works is “Los solteros” (The Bachelors) (2026), seen here in mid-installation by Isra Pérez. Dozens of galvanised sheet-steel forms hang in a line some eight metres long, as if strung up in a workshop. Some read as calligraphic punctuation marks, others recall a swashbuckler’s cutlass. Many hint at baroque curlicues or ornate limbs, or at extended versions of the Burmester set, those so-called French curves used in technical drafting. If the title is a clue (and of course it is), they also summon the wooden templates of Marcel Duchamp’s “3 Standard Stoppages” (1913-14) and the mannequin-like bachelor figures of “The Large Glass” (1915-23).
Each metal shape copies a different template the artists found in artisans’ workshops in the Santa Cruz and La Laguna areas: guides used by carpenters and furniture makers to shape wood, or by shoemakers to cut leather. These are reproductions of pattern-cutting tools whose purpose was already to produce copies, objects that exist so that other things can be made more-or-less the same. Here the templates, normally left in the workshop and valued only for what they make, become the exhibited work. Once a way of guiding a pencil or a knife along a reliable but imperfect line, they now hang apparently redundant, made obsolete by newer means of production. A row of lonely singles with little hope of reproducing.
Pattern-making and line-tracing recur throughout “A Parrot, Three Bars, and Gold Teeth” as a kind of instinctive methodology. The exhibition follows the curves of risqué comic-book drawings from the 1970s and the organic grid of woven reeds once used as walls. It also echoes sinuous Neo-Mudéjar mouldings from a ruined building in the rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood near the museum. The result is at once modern and premodern, multiple and heterogeneous, drawing its rhythm and rhyme from disparate sources and temporalities. There is an echo of Caroline Levine’s argument in her 2015 book “Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network”. Pattern is a category that travels freely between art and other forms of lived experience. What organises a row of steel curves might once have organised the workshop, shaped by the demands of labour and by shifts in technology and taste. Patterns and connecting lines might shape a visit to a museum as much as sitting on an old wooden chair or walking in a new pair of leather shoes. Pattern here moves with the city itself, cutting through thousands of tiny rituals and everyday norms, repeated but never quite the same, traced within the city and the island and running out into the world.