About the consciousness in the contemporary novel production
Every time I see a finished work of art, I wonder about the roads that the artist possibly travelled to get to what I have before my eyes. If he got there because he wanted to, how he wanted, if he could do so respecting the original plan, if he changed it on the way or if it just came out this way. Sometimes this can be perceived and sometimes it is hidden, as if refusing it, for being the wrong way or maybe a traumatic one.
As an artist, I understand the challenging moments in the process of making a work of art, distinguishing between the potential abandonment before the absence of the muse, the methodical and never ending struggle towards reaching the sketched destination, the comfort before the sudden fluency when executing the work of art,
or even the indifference as an art-punk attitude towards the problems facing execution.
The challenge, and well as the lack of interest, are territories to take hold of. Something different is the value of conquest in one or the other, but both are calling for something, there are evident manifests in each one of these contrasting approaches. However the lack of interest, the role most adopted by this generation, wouldn’t seem to be a declared position; on the contrary, it seems to be the result of a chronic nonconformity, as an unsustainable doze over time.
From this counterpoint, there are two guidelines that we can observe regarding these apparently opposite artistic method: a completely thorough virtuosism, founded in the need to demonstrate the artistic ability from a pretentious point of view technically speaking; or the radically opposite, a work that completely denies these stages and places itself in the immaterial sphere, belittling any trace of academicism, as a contemporary structure that breaks down on what is established. In both cases one can evidently detect problems concerning technique and craft, that both in the appreciating and in the discrediting, is seen as an important conceptual axis of the productions.
What happens that, after so many years of breakdowns and ruptures, the «how» ones again submits the «why»? It seems to be a complicated era for questions in the productions of the young generation of contemporary art, which has amalgamated the scene in which it´s circumscribes to its production. This so called involution towards technicalities, which is the most obvious and simple ground to appropriate- meaning that things are already said, were made and are evident-only demonstrates the strong lack of ability to work in the second and subsequent layers, those who make the work valuable, serious and sensitive. The productions that assure having a stance, a given point of view and do not, because they only move around ideological surfaces, are twice as dangerous, because they establish self-credited structures of authority, which get closer to a wannabe world charged with an almost TV sensationalism
However, there are many other productions that do make this dilemma the conceptual axis of their production; questioning through technique, the preservation and classical methods of realization, the «how» regarding transcendence. Luciana Rondolini understands that the work she makes is designed to run its own death, almost like life itself, only that at a faster speed for our eyes to absorve that we do not consider for ourselves. The work, that is formed in the time that it takes the fruit to decompose and drop the rhinestones, those that made them fancy during the conception of its youth, is at times a cruel confrontation for those who are fragile before the issue.
But that is at the same time what relieves the work, takes away the pretentious aura of perpetuity and presents it modest for thought. This way it confronts the artist’s own fears and of those who objectively look at the fancy fruit death cycle: not being anything or anyone and leaving no trace. This is presented in the naturalness of a cycle that is common to all that once started, the very end. These fruits that decompose at a normal speed, only show the courage of an artist who is sure that the traces are only remains of something that completed its cycle, and a sequela is a trademark unable to change, someone has already said, the future does not belong to us.
In contrast to the development behind Rondolini´s work, and resuming the above paragraphs, I can situate Diego De Aduriz as a good example of the artist who does not question. He who has experienced in design and fashion, seems not to go deeper than the cortex of things, and even if he proposes to get to the most absurd extremes regarding the execution of the work, only scratches it’s surface.
From the cool outfit to an out of fashion trash (which is now trendy), both in his paintings and in his performances an absenteeism of substantial maturity is revealed, we can talk about the unfortunate appearance at Friezze in 2008 to affirm what is being said. The favorable aspect of his work -the image that emulates the digital and daring chromaticism- is so tied to this childish attitude that it prevails in his image that misdirected by the bill, becomes minor. All of that intense fluorescence that commands his work, a support of Aduriz’s retinal proposal, is limited to the lines of the drawing and not to the painting. The fibers (from mere sketching) confine his work to a pre-schooling and unlearned world, which therefore will expire with the evaporation of his soft inks as the days go by. Two years and the excitement that is in the work today will disappear. If the chromatic vibration of the images is the only apparent gift possessed, it is clear that this work is ephemeral without even proposing it with the adequate anticipation.
Both artists- as if illustrating a Do & Don´t of a magazine of the moment- clearly think, about young contemporary productions that explore the methods map, from a sharp reflection as well as from a slight unconsciousness.
Sauna. Year 1 Nr 1. 2010