During an artistic residence at the Revolver Gallery in Peru in
2010, José Luis Landet built a machine to draw backwards. Using a television
screen and closed-circuit
cameras, the device filmed the paper backing on which Landet drew
while watching the inverted image projected live by the monitor, creating a
mirror effect. This experiment resulted in more than a hundred drawings emanating
madness and fragmentation derived from the effort implied in working with the
opposite brain hemisphere.
A machine that reorganizes and undoes all that has been learned, a mirror that reflects
the sinister in every cognitive and programmatic act may be the only way to rebuild the meaning. Not as a conscious and rational process but from the blind imbalance, for fate to
re- level the ever tense relations between the standard and the excess, between reason and instinct, between the human and the machine. That gesture, working from the disproportion
and dislocating our
perception, re-unites and reconciles us with the neglected hemisphere. And
as in an act of faith, it invites us to reflect from the margins and outside the patterns on other models of
building relationships.
We are the
children of a generation that suffered the programmed
dismantling of its cultural and
educational project. We are a generation which questioned
the foundations of an authoritarian,
selfish and unequal society, and
was thus persecuted and combated.
Today we live in a fragmented way
and walk among splinters, represented
by the anguish of knowing that no existing
systems work and that perhaps the
only way out of this restlessness
and lack of faith is turning all that has been learned upside down.
When
tradition is presented to us as a terrifying reminder
of what has been imposed, one possible
solution may be to look at the
margins. Maybe, there lies the possibility
to amend our bonds with the past and turn it into our present.
In painting, margin is not only the edges of the frame but also the
pictures that are part of an area outside the world of art, and which were
painted by people who are not considered artists or whose works are not considered
"art". Pictures by amateur painters, Sunday painters, working in the
shadows; their signatures - always appearing in the margins-do nothing more
than reaffirm their anonymity. Paintings which will be sold for a small sum of
money that will hopefully amount to the cost of the materials, canvas destined
to be second-hand objects at a flea
market.Just as the remains of a flood, Landet collects these seemingly harmless paintings but that keep residual forces of a conservative and reactionary past within its matrix, this also being part of the mediocre imaginary construct of a bourgeoisie that continues to resist- even to this day- crouched and condemned to live the bucolic course of a concept of tradition that no longer belongs to anyone.
There again, the
system rearranges itself to create a new order. Landet strips and reveals what
we, because it’s located in the margins, don’t often want to see. He
reorganizes the material in a way that dismantles it at the same time. Working from
the denial of the shape presented to him, he creates a monstrous yet vital device
which compels us to observe and rebuild from a lost time – which isn’t that
time of utopias of revolution and emancipation once denied to our parents, but
a time out of time which assumes fragmentation as constitutive and not as a
consequence and effect of such dismantling. A statement also built on the
remains of a question as uncomfortable as necessary: if past presents itself
with a terrifying image and every system has become inhumane, what tools are
left for us to reconnect with what has been learnt?
The arsenal
offered by Landet brings out into the open that a certain tradition in the
margins of contemporary art having lost its splendor consists of opaque images
of sceneries where the agricultural bourgeoisie built the Argentinean landscape,
and that an invisible cemetery lies beneath the land. Many of the paintings
found by Landet at flea markets are part of that nostalgic imaginary articulating
the power, the culture and the economy of the bourgeoisie with the myth of the pampas.
Landet, like an anthropophagous, deconstructs the costumbrist imaginary by slicing
it; he puts together all its fragments to create a distorted universe which in
a baroque, excessive, and vital abstraction gives us back the sinister excess
of having liberated us.
Tomás Espina
Syd Krochmanly
Un
sistema para la liberación.
Durante una residencia en la galería Revólver (2010) en Perú José Luis Landet fabricó una máquina para
dibujar al revés. Con una pantalla de televisión y un circuito cerrado el
dispositivo filmaba espejando el soporte de papel sobre el cual Landet dibujaba mientras miraba la imagen invertida
que el monitor proyectaba en vivo y en directo. El resultado fue más de un
centenar de dibujos que emanan el desquicio y la fragmentación resultante de la
inversión que implicó trabajar con el hemisferio opuesto del cerebro.
Una máquina que reorganice y deshaga lo aprendido, un espejo que
refleje lo siniestro de todo acto cognitivo y programático, quizás sea la única
posibilidad para reconstruir el sentido. Pero no como una operación consciente
y racional sino desde el desequilibrio a ciegas para que el azar nivele otra
vez las relaciones siempre tensas entre la norma y la desmesura, entre la razón
y el instinto, entre lo humano y la máquina. Ese gesto que trabaja desde la
desproporción y disloca nuestra percepción nos reintegra y reconcilia con el
hemisferio desplazado. Y así como en un acto de fe, nos invita a pensar desde
los márgenes y fuera de las formas otros modelos de construcción de relaciones.
Somos hijos de una generación que sufrió
el desmantelamiento programado de su proyecto cultural y educativo. Una
generación que puso en duda los
fundamentos de una sociedad autoritaria, egoísta y desigual, y que por ello fue perseguida y
combatida. Hoy vivimos fragmentados y caminamos entre las esquirlas, signados
por la angustia de saber que ya no hay sistemas que funcionen y que tal vez el
único modo de salir del desasosiego y la falta de fe sea poniendo todo lo
aprendido patas para arriba.
Cuando la tradición se nos presenta como el recuerdo
terrorífico de lo que ha sido impuesto a
la fuerza, quizás una salida posible sea mirar los márgenes. Tal vez ahí se
encuentre depositada la posibilidad de enmendar nuestros lazos con el pasado y
así hacerlo presente.
En pintura se denomina margen
tanto a los bordes de un cuadro
como a los cuadros que forman parte de una zona que está fuera del mundo del
arte, y que fueron pintados por personas que no son consideradas artistas, y
tampoco sus trabajos son considerados “arte”. Cuadros de pintores amateurs,
pintores de domingo, que trabajan en las sombras, y sus firmas -siempre en los
márgenes- no hacen más que reafirmar su
anonimato. Pinturas que tendrán como único destino ser vendidas por una pequeña
suma de dinero que con suerte equivale al costo de los materiales, lienzos
destinados a ser objetos de segunda mano en el mercado de pulgas.
Como los restos de un diluvio Landet recoge esas pinturas
aparentemente inofensivas, pero que guardan en su matriz las fuerzas residuales
de un pasado conservador y reaccionario, que son también parte del imaginario
mediocre de una burguesía que aún hoy en
día parece resistirse, agazapada y condenada a vivir el derrotero bucólico de
una idea de tradición que ya a nadie le pertenece.
Tomás Espina
Syd Krochmanly
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