‘Armando Andrade Tudela’, written by Mark Godfrey and published in Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography, Phaidon, London, 2006

Armando Andrade Tudela’s initial photographic projects confronted the geography and economy of his home country, Peru, whilst deploying modes of photography associated with 1960s Conceptual art. “Camion” (2003), his first major series, was presented as a small artist’s book and as a slide show. All the images showed lorries on Peruvian motorways and in lay-bys, each one brightly decorated with a colourful abstract design. The photographs were casually taken, often from a moving vehicle. No attempt was made to centre the photographic subject nor to render the lorry in perfect lighting conditions: this archive was assembled on the move. Because of their amateurish appearance and their mode of presentation, the photographs conjured up the feel of Ed Ruscha’s early pictures of gas stations, while the subject matter recalled John Baldessari’s The Back of all the Trucks Passed While Driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, California, Sunday 20 January 1963 (1963). In the contemporary context of elaborate and large-scale digital photography, Andrade Tudela’s redeployment of ‘de-skilled’ photography seemed urgent but his series posed new questions to those raised by Ruscha and Baldessari to what extent do the truck’s designs recall the traditions of Latin American abstraction? Are these individual designs almost obsolete, soon to be eclipsed by the rationalised logos of global freight corporations?

Andrade Tudela continued to explore the subject of abstraction in his next series with photographs also taken on Peruvian roadsides. Here he found disused structures formerly used to display massive adverts. One group of images showed skeletal metal structures that would have held up the panels; another showed the metal structures with the panels intact. But there were no adverts visible: they had been entirely or partially removed and the panels were laid bare. The first structures in the first group called to mind mid-century modernist sculptures made from found lengths of metal such as those by Mark di Suvero. The empty panels meanwhile recalled the abstract paintings of Ellsworth Kelly. There was a utopian dimension to the series, as the photographs suggested that abstraction can be discovered anywhere, but also a sense of pessimism. The degradation of the billboards bore witness to the vicissitudes of a developing economy. Abstraction can be found, but only in a wasteland.

Photographs like Billboard (2002-4) were carefully taken, each from the same distance to the subject and printed singly rather than reproduced in an artist’s book. The latter format has continued to serve Andrade Tudela, particularly to confront the history of Brazilian sculpture. In 2005 he took a number of record sleeves of Caetano Veloso’s 1972 album Transa and joined them together by their seams into a form that could be manipulated into a number of different configurations. Though this form was precisely based on Lygia Clark’s Bichos (a series of hinged metal objects dating from the early 1960s), Andrade Tudela’s work coupled the memory of Clark’s neo-concretism with that of Tropicalia, a slightly later Brazilian avant-garde group with which Veloso was associated. His photographs documented the sculpture in its various possible arrangements, and were photocopied and bound in a limited edition publication.

Most recently, Andrade Tudela has stepped away from making photographs in series. Enigmatic individual images show singular subjects. One image, a portrait of his friend, is overexposed by a double flash, so that the figure is almost bleached out to invisibility, another shows a view down to a floor covered with cheap plastic tiles. One has lifted slightly revealing a small dark aperture. If the image recalls Andrade Tudela’s interest in the order of geometric abstraction, so too the rupture in the grid reminds us that abstraction is now present in ruins alone.