Perro

Perro is the Spanish word for dog, but in Latin America it also names the abandoned, ownerless animal that survives at the edge of a settlement: the perro callejero, the street dog. Neither pet nor wild, it is a third category that exists in the spaces colonial planning forgot to designate. Here the dog is that figure: the category of the leftover, what the building's organisation could not absorb.

The red grid is the layer-out grid floor-tilers use to align rectangular elements before they are fixed down, the temporary scaffold that disappears once the floor is laid. Perro makes that scaffold permanent: it leaves the alignment visible in red and refuses the floor that should follow. The grid is what construction removes; this work keeps it, as the residue of a labour that was never completed. The dog lies on the unfinished floor, in the place where the building did not finish becoming itself.

The materials are building-site vocabulary, chosen against the gallery's taste for refined surfaces: Alpine fir, the local softwood of temporary construction, and red moquette, industrial felt carpet in the red of construction marking tape, bought from a builder's supply and cut to dimension. The work is not to be walked on but circled: the viewer moves around the dog as around an animal they do not know, a cautious circulation that mirrors how settlements live alongside their resident street dogs.

"The central tension lies between form recognition and structural reduction. The dog-form and the architectural grid occupy the same physical space without synthesis. Neither reading supersedes the other; they coexist in productive contradiction."

Critical review, 2026

I want to defend the oscillation as the work. The dog is not separate from the architecture; the dog is what the architecture left over when it was making the floor, and the grid is not abstract ornament but the residue of the labour that was never finished, kept visible in red.