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José Luis Landet
Argentina, 1977
José Luis Landet’s work is conceived as a space where various ways of operating and assimilating cultural processes are produced, shaped by social, political, and ideological actions. His interest lies in the investigation of sociocultural remnants and discards, as can be seen in his recovery of romantic and bucolic oil paintings from the 1940s to 1970s, commonly created by amateur artists—the so-called «Sunday painters.» In this sense, Landet’s work seeks a certain notion of paradise, recreating the apocryphal.
The various materials that make up his works may include these pictorial representations, as well as other symbolic elements such as everyday objects, photographs, letters, postcards, transparencies, writings, magazines, and books, generating both material and conceptual deconstructions.
José Luis Landet’s work reveals not only the materiality of its elements but also their memory, time, and usage. Likewise, each artistic project is imbued with specificities and, therefore, requires a complex creative process, which begins with classification and extends through archiving, cutting, breaking, layering, forging, soaking, fragmenting, and simulating.
In this sense, Landet’s metaphorical-poetic actions are expressed in liminal spaces—between the public and the private, the utopian past and the dystopian present, silence and communication, and even between a universalizing history and gestures aimed at historiographic reframing from a local context.
He has exhibited at institutions such as Fundación PROA, Museo Ex Teresa Arte Actual, FLORA ars+natura, and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, among others.
His work is part of collections such as Jumex, Louisiana Museum, LACMA, Jorge Pérez Collection, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Sayago & Pardon, JoAnn González-Hickey Collection, and Brillembourg Capriles Collection.
José Luis Landet. OFF Screen, Paris. 2024. W-Galería
La visión detrás [The Vision Behind]
José Luis Landet
In 1969, the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler stated: «The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.» As if these words burned inside him, José Luis Landet questions the ways in which sociocultural objects are produced, circulated, and consumed, working with some of their residues: landscape paintings by amateur artists made between 1940 and 1970, encyclopedias, magazines, books, memorabilia from 20th-century leftist political movements, and forgotten photographs.
Over the years, José Luis has developed a method to collect, classify, and transform these objects. Through a more or less stable series of actions, he brings materials together, interrogates them, and focuses on the details that exist on the margins. He wrests them from the past, disrupts them, and opens them up. He proposes a game in which images become his companions, and together, they enter a permanent state of negotiation of meanings. In other words, they produce the present.
At times, what emerges and lingers from the vast materiality involved in his practice are subtle gestures, aphorisms, and flashes with an oracular vocation. At other times, the mechanisms of fiction are set in motion, giving rise to stories, characters, and languages. With an archive of signatures as a starting point, and in collaboration with colleagues, friends, and family, José Luis not only explores the possible identities of these characters but also creates the conditions for their stories to follow a free course.
Recently, Landet has worked closely with La Bomba de Humo, a theatrical improvisation group that has brought these characters into the realm of body expression, collective work, and rhythmic ideas. In this new fictional turn, improvisation unfolds like a network that weaves and unravels in a bird’s-eye motion, linking meanings and experiences, creating languages and rituals, and altering temporality once again.
Rather than assuming a place in the appropriationist conceptual tradition, Landet’s poetic processes resonate with what writer Cristina Rivera Garza calls «disappropriation», strategies that «move toward what is one’s own and toward what is foreign as foreign, necessarily rejecting the return to the circulation of authorship and capital, while maintaining the inscriptions of the other and others within the process.»
José Luis delves into these time-saturated experiences, works alongside them and with others; expands the range of possible interlocutors beyond human subjectivities, their lives, and their deaths; and aligns himself with materials, gestures, and the potentialities of language.
This collective unfolding welcomes us, embraces us, invites us to join the game—to observe, interpret, sing, exchange, think, feel, and find ourselves in the fleeting, elusive emotion of this irreducibly political artistic practice.
Tania Puente
Researcher and Curator
José Luis Landet. La visión detrás. Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires. 2023
José Luis Landet
Bordes y contornos de la representación
2022
Fragments of oil on canvas (1940-1970)
225 x 200 cm
Materialismo de un descarte. [Materialism of a Discard]
Perception of the Landet Universe
Section 11: Composting
This is a technique that creates the necessary conditions for decomposer organisms to transform organic waste into high-quality compost.
José Luis Landet thrives on cultural discards and has developed a practice of constant and rhythmic construction—a vast ATLAS-like ground that unfolds in multiple directions, continuously and steadily.
His practice welcomes all kinds of manifestations: painting, literature, letters, photographs, encyclopedias, etc. The movement he generates in search of symbolic material is what keeps his soil oxygenated—the foundation upon which he works.
These discards accumulate daily, systematically, contributing to the fragmentation and decomposition of symbolic matter. This behavior fosters the incorporation of new attributes into his own universe: the liberation of original forms.
Thus, Landet’s ground is a vast layer of organic matter, cultivated by himself. It is not an exaggeration to think that this expanse occupies the entire terrestrial layer, as there is no interruption in its production and reproduction. His work is his vital material, his living matter. Every «discard» he finds replicates itself infinitely in form and substance.
Materialism of a Discard brings together a small fragment of the Landet Universe. Starting with paintings by amateur artists acquired in flea markets (from the 1940s to the 1970s), José Luis performs a first gesture: the fragmentation of these works. Once segmented, he groups them at will—by color, shape, signature, texture, theme, etc. Then, he glues them, continues cutting, sets them on fire, sands them, paints them, draws on them, submerges them, etc.
All these gestures are carried out in the pursuit of reclaiming those invisible and discarded artists—those overlooked by hegemonic history. José Luis sheds light.
As for the edges of the paintings: these are the areas most damaged by the passage of time. The canvas wraps around the stretcher bars to hold itself in place for display, but ends up marked and rusted by the nails.
Landet rescues these remnants and constructs a new narrative. These edges become the core material of «Materialism of a Discard»:
Maps of landscapes painted and drawn upon themselves, folding inward in search of symbolic matter. A loop that folds in on itself, becoming infinite.
Lucila Gradin
José Luis Landet
Paisaje morfina B
2020
Fragments of oil on canvas, glue, charcoal, colored enamel, black spray, fabric, and latex.
40 x 30 cm each
5.200 € (VAT included)
José Luis Landet
El universo inteligente
2022
Oil, encaustic, and newspaper on canvas
25,5 x 31 cm
1.550 € (VAT included)
José Luis Landet
El universo se explica a sí mismo
2022
Oil, encaustic, and newspaper on canvas
25,5 x 31 cm
Sold. Private collection
José Luis Landet. Materialismo de un descarte. 2022. NF/NIEVES FERNANDEZ, Madrid
José Luis Landet
Esculto-pintura 16
2021
Fragments of oil on canvas on wood
26 x 24 x 20 cm, metal support 20 x 20 cm
Sold. Private collection
José Luis Landet
Esculto-pintura 15
2021
Fragments of oil on canvas on wood
27 x 27 x 29 cm, metal support 20 x20 cm
Sold. Private collection
José Luis Landet. Materialismo de un descarte. 2022. NF/NIEVES FERNANDEZ, Madrid
José Luis Landet
Esculto-pintura 01
2021
Fragments of oil on canvas on wood
32 x 26,5 x 31 cm, soporte de metal 25 x 30 cm
5.200 € (VAT included)
José Luis Landet. Materialismo de un descarte. 2022. NF/NIEVES FERNANDEZ, Madrid
José Luis Landet
Reverso
2022
45 fragments of oil on canvas (1940-1970)
200 x 341 cm
16.500 € (VAT included)
José Luis Landet. Materialismo de un descarte. 2022. NF/NIEVES FERNANDEZ, Madrid
José Luis Landet
Firmas
2022
45 fragments of oil on canvas (1940-1970)
54 x 260 cm
6.400 € (VAT included)
José Luis Landet
Untitled
2022
Charcoal, enamel, encaustic, and linseed oil on paper
130 x 208 cm
6.000 € (VAT included)
José Luis Landet
Untitled
2021
Charcoal, enamel, encaustic, and linseed oil on paper
130 x 104 cm
4.200 € (VAT included)
José Luis Landet
Untitled (Díptico)
2022
Fragments of oil on canvas, glue, colored oil, glue on paper
38,50 x 56,50 cm
3.100 € (VAT included)
José Luis Landet
Untitled (Díptico)
2022
Fragments of oil on canvas, glue, colored oil, glue on paper
38,50 x 56,50 cm
3.100 € (VAT included)
José Luis Landet
Untitled (Díptico)
2022
Fragments of oil on canvas, glue, colored oil, glue on paper
38,50 x 56,50 cm
3.100 € (VAT included)
José Luis Landet
Untitled (Díptico)
2022
Fragments of oil on canvas, glue, colored oil, glue on paper
38,50 x 56,50 cm
3.100 € (VAT included)
José Luis Landet. Materialismo de un descarte. 2022. NF/NIEVES FERNANDEZ, Madrid
José Luis Landet
Grafología, firma, carta y retrato
2022
Printed paper, fragment of oil on canvas (1940-1970), ink, and glue
39.5 x 58 cm
José Luis Landet
Julio Romero
2022
Silkscreen on paper, 4 colors
100 x 70 cm
José Luis Landet
Retrato
2022
Silkscreen on paper, 4 inks
100 x 70 cm
José Luis Landet. Materialismo de un descarte. 2022. NF/NIEVES FERNANDEZ, Madrid
José Luis Landet
La vida en los bosques
2021
Fragments of oil on canvas and black enamel
26,5 x 20,5 cm each piece (8 pieces)
11.000 € (VAT included)
José Luis Landet. El atajo. MARCO La Boca, Buenos Aires. 2021
José Luis Landet
Paisaje perpendicular
2021
Fragments of oil on canvas and black enamel, glue, and wood
22 x 27 cm each (6 pieces)
José Luis Landet. The Manifested Landscape. LACA Projects, Estados Unidos. 2019
José Luis Landet
Bordes
2019
Fragments of canvases
140 x 110 cm
11.000 € (VAT included)
Estar Siendo
Bajo una bandera ajena [Under a Foreign Flag]
For four years, the Argentine artist José Luis Landet served as the archon of the archive of painter Carlos Gómez. The role of an archon is twofold: to safeguard the physical space that houses the documents and to interpret them in order to give them meaning. During those four years, Landet was responsible for classifying paintings, correspondence, journals, and diaries of the late Gómez. In fulfilling this hermeneutic function, he manipulated, imagined, and completed unfinished projects. By the time of the first exhibition, the distinction between author and authority had become indistinguishable.
From a certain perspective, an archive is never truly exhausted—it is a mass of documents capable of providing endless possibilities for constructing different narratives. In this sense, Gómez’s work could continue evolving and generating new stories, granting autonomy to its archon. This autonomy, bestowed upon Landet after years of dedicated work, has multiple effects on his production. The most noticeable is his intervention in the images Gómez had originally conceived for unfinished projects. Landet appropriates them to reflect on contemporary aesthetic issues.
Just as archives generate their own discourses through the random concatenation of documents, today’s media automatically generate political images. The threatening aestheticization of politics seems inevitable, making political art itself appear to lose meaning. In response, Landet deliberately performs an iconoclastic act: he destroys the flags of the American nations, leaving only their borders, removing the national emblems, and submerging them in black paint—just as Gómez had done in search of aphorisms within Lenin’s books. This sacrifice of national flags is a provocative deconstruction that seeks to create a new grammar of national symbols, denouncing the painful failure of the longed-for Patria Grande, a vision of ideological unity for the American continent from the 1970s to the early decades of the 21st century.
The devastation, emptying, and reconfiguration of the political symbol grammar carried out by José Luis Landet seems to have been suggested by the margins that so greatly interested his mentor. In this case, it is the epigraph of a text by Lenin, «Under a Foreign Flag,» which Gómez himself had torn from a volume of collected works, that serves as the conceptual starting point for Landet’s work—a suggested and open-ended instruction.
Landet’s current endeavor seems to resist two extremes of a traditional model for interpreting art history: he neither reduces history to those agents who support the oppressed classes, nor does he dismiss artists who reject labor as value, whose playful practice challenges economic systems. These two rejections of conventional social art history result in a body of work deeply critical of the American geocultural framework.
It is within this geopolitical framework that Landet traces one of Gómez’s key intellectual interlocutors: the Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch. Kusch’s thinking challenged the instrumental rationality of Western thought, aiming instead to develop an American situated philosophy. In this context, Landet’s radical iconoclastic act—the obscuring of national emblems and the bucolic landscapes painted by amateur artists in a distinctly Western key—becomes an allegory for one of Kusch’s central concepts: the tenebrous. On the other hand, the deconstruction of flag elements reframes the category of the formless, adjusting and questioning the collective instinct that binds the sign to the signified.
From Kusch’s perspective, American art is an action that resolves a fundamental flaw in existence. Landscapes fragment and conjure themselves anew. If in America, the living and the dynamic belong to the subterranean layers of society, Landet incorporates paintings excluded from the canon of art history, darkens them, shrouds them in shadow to cast new light.
José Luis Landet. Estar siendo bajo una bandera ajena. 2018. NF/NIEVES FERNANDEZ, Madrid.
José Luis Landet
Fieltros, escudos
2018
Black enamel and felt
32.5 x 23.5 cm each
134 x 286 cm
José Luis Landet
Estar siendo 4
2018
Oil, glue, ferrite, and spray on canvas (1940-1970)
100 x 80 cm
José Luis Landet
Estar siendo 8
2018
Spray on canvas
100 x 80 cm / 39.37 x 31.50 in
José Luis Landet. Estar siendo bajo una bandera ajena. 2018. NF/NIEVES FERNANDEZ, Madrid.
José Luis Landet
Frases 1978 C. G.
2018
Print on magazine paper
32.5 x 23 cm each
138 x 260 cm
José Luis Landet
Banderas, bordes y contornos
2018
20 flags with wooden poles
José Luis Landet. Estar siendo bajo una bandera ajena. 2018. NF/NIEVES FERNANDEZ, Madrid.
José Luis Landet. Jardín PROA21. Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires. 2018
José Luis Landet. Tiren papelitos. Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires. 2018
José Luis Landet. Paraísos artificiales. Ex Teresa Arte Actual, México DF. 2017
José Luis Landet
Untitled
2017
Fragments of oil on canvas (1940-1970), matte synthetic enamel, and glue on canvas
100 x 80 cm / 39.37 x 31.50 in
José Luis Landet
Untitled
2017
Paint, spray, and glue on canvas
100 x 80 cm / 39.37 x 31.50 in
José Luis Landet
Paisaje Morfina
2017
Black synthetic enamel, fragment of oil painting on canvas (1940-1970), and glue
40 x 30 cm
José Luis Landet
Paisaje Morfina
2017
Black synthetic enamel, fragment of oil painting on canvas (1940-1970), and glue
40 x 30 cm
José Luis Landet
Paisaje Morfina
2017
Black synthetic enamel, fragment of oil painting on canvas (1940-1970), and glue
40 x 30 cm
José Luis Landet
Doma, archivo fotográfico personal 1977
2016
Oil on photography
30 x 23 cm / 11.81 x 9.10 in
José Luis Landet. Firmas. Centro Cultural Kirchner, Buenos Aires. 2016
José Luis Landet
Novedades 1940-1970
2016
Newspaper/oil/canvas
30 x 20 cm each
José Luis Landet
Revista Internacional. 1940-1970
2016
Newsprint paper, fragment of oil painting on canvas (1940-1970), and glue
30 x 20 cm each / 11.81 x 7.87 in
José Luis Landet. Doma. Arróniz, México. 2016
José Luis Landet
Sketches 1940-1970
2015
Oil on canvas on paper
45,7 x 61 cm
José Luis Landet
Sketches 1940-1970
2015
Oil on canvas on paper
45,7 x 61 cm
José Luis Landet
Sketches 1940-1970
2015
Oil on canvas on paper
45,7 x 61 cm
José Luis Landet
Sketches 1940-1970
2015
Oil on canvas on paper
45,7 x 61 cm
José Luis Landet
Sketches 1940-1970
2015
Oil on canvas on paper
45,7 x 61 cm
José Luis Landet
Sketches 1940-1970
2015
Oil on canvas on paper
45,7 x 61 cm
José Luis Landet. Verosimil-Ficcional. Document Art galería, Buenos Aires. 2013