El Castigo
10.09.2020 - 15.06.2021
Opening Exhibition
In the year 2020, authority intruded into our lives with behavioral control mechanisms, using surveillance as a constant resource. Without contingency between monitoring and punishing, when it is understood as random, it can be attributed by the individual as inherent to existence, as an evil from which it is not possible to escape. In the absence of reinforcements and in a scenario where the punitive predominates, the human being stops responding under a state of Learned Helplessness, potentially becoming a wandering being reduced to the fetal level.
Screenprints of Rafael Canogar with the peasants of the Solentiname Archipelago from the seventies presented in conjunction with the syncretic sculptures of the poet Ernesto Cardenal, in conversation with a deconstructive sculpture Abraham Cruzvillegas.The clinical documents on Alzheimer's by Rafael Díaz, the radiographic studies of Muriel Hasbun, Duel (1898) by Joaquín Torres García, the long-awaited grid of the city by Vicente Rojo or the stolen scenes of the daily tumult of Javier de Villota in his selves. I saw it, and this too and again Canogar with his Cacheo, (1973). The perspective is then dislocated with the photography of Daniel Silvo and his satirical allusion to other historical quarantines such as the nuclear quarantine of the 40s and 50s. For their part, the Mexican photographers Graciela Iturbide and Yolanda Andrade capture a decisive moment of eros thanatos in a sort of catharsis. It is in this disruption that Chema Madoz appears to open the possibility by stopping the unrepresentable.
The viewer and the collective experience are activated in this exhibition that is detached from the political. The outcome of this story must be understood from a pro-positive point of view: the punishment punishes us, but do we have individual responsibility in perceiving the deepest nuances of this crisis? What has been born from forced introspection in a society that lives off the external? Have we been able to reconnect with the part of our being that denies helplessness?
Yolanda Andrade | Rafael Canogar | Ernesto Cardenal | Abraham Cruzvillegas | Rafael Díaz | Simon Edmondson | Muriel Hasbun | Graciela Iturbide | Chema Madoz | Guillermo Núñez | Vicente Rojo I Daniel Silvo | Comunidad de Solentiname | Joaquín Torres García | Javier de Villota
