I am interested in the dynamics generated when you want something and you know, at the same time, you don’t need or can’t possess. When that desire becomes a whim.
Advertising works following this logic. Although we can dispense with most of the products sold in the market, publicity creates the need to have unnecessary objects. The same happens with people in relation to attraction, some people, for they become impossible, they become more desirable.
Many times we succumb to the charms of publicity and, if we can, we end up acquiring all kinds of objects that with time and good use, become old and worn.
But my fruits have not been bitten. Coated with a thick layer of plastic beads, they will rot without being consumed. They suffer from the slow and relentless change of time. They represent everything that was about to materialize once and yet has become impossible for some reason; the need to hold what every day becomes more distant and blurry with the distance, what you can’t own or control. The same transformation that imperceptibly affects everything you want and treasure.
The fruits that I decorate simulate jewellery pieces. Maybe they are. However, unlike the original, time transforms them even beneath that protective layer of supposed diamonds.
Jewels as a symbol of material wealth, are associated with vanity and social status. Moreover, in most traditions they also mean spiritual truth and wisdom symbols. In the treasures guarded by dragons, the hero must overcome a series of obstacles and works to get to the cave full of gold and riches; this struggle allows him to achieve a wisdom that is related to the amount of experience and knowledge connected to the pragmatic and evolutionary.
My first fruit was an experiment. Or an act of superstition.
This amulet was commissioned to accommodate my desire and so its influence, dissociating myself from it. An object owned and observed from the distance. The resignation of my claims in its symbolization. The slow disintegration of that which was valuable and the acceptance of what is and will be.
I took an apple, one of the classic components of still life and began to cover the surface with plastic diamonds purchased at Once, pasted one by one. On the front, for revenge but also search, I made a hole up to its heart seed.
The first few weeks my apple started to contract. The hole began to close like the mouth of an old woman, the skin wrinkled and darkened. The flesh began to stink and lose its texture. I took some pictures. I placed it in the sun so that the syrup that came out, dried out. At first it was good, but over the days, it filled with dust and began to lose some gems. I glued them back with a new stick. The original plot had been left off centred. Finally I decided to leave it alone, not to touch it. Meanwhile, other parts fell and the interior remained completely dark. A fat black fly appeared, it flew not on the jewel but on an opaque shell. The same apple, now dull and lacking of shine, had lost all its freshness.
The decline of everything that one wants is the most dreaded stage. And revert it is beyond our reach. Just because it defies all laws of nature. Any indication of exhaustion, fatigue and senility as a result of dissolution and decomposition of the shape, colour and odour, causes a reaction of displeasure followed by anxiety and certain degree of repulsion. So the new, cute and nice is what sells and what you buy with absolute conviction.
Revista Bamboo (Issue N.11), Buenos Aires, 2013.