A la conquista del caucho

ArredondoArozarena presents the group exhibition ‘A la conquista del caucho‘. The selection of artworks intends to suggest that, if nature is chaotic, it is possible that the languages created by man to represent it, narrate it, rebuild it or deny it, are nothing more than sometimes humble, useless, or deeply delusional attempts to sort, select and interpret chaos. ‘Buscando Patrones’ [Seeking Patterns] by Rodolfo Diaz Cervantes, for example, calls on the construction of a fictitious geometry by establishing random patterns in the image of a flock of chickens or a pair of landscapes, while ‘Sin título (SEBEC)’ [Untitled (Prospection in SEBEC)] is a piece that presents fake meteorites made of plaster by students from a school in Culiacan, Sinaloa in Mexico. For this project, Fritzia Irizar asked the students to recall and reproduce the shape of Bacubirito, a meteorite that fell near the city (1863) and that is now displayed as a monument. By presenting false meteorites that emulate the scientific methods of classifying and cataloging, the artist proposes that scientific disciplines are not necessarily an accurate reading of nature, as they are also traversed by fiction, distorted discourses and constructed subjectivities.

On the other hand, in ‘Hitos Deconstruidos’ [Milestones Deconstructed], the series of postcards reproducing famous sculptures, Diaz Cervantes interferes—through the physical elimination of fragments of the image—with the cultural discourses that categorize a simple object as a masterpiece (as in the discourse of cultural tourism, for example). In the series of collages ‘Sin Título’ [Untitled] the artist formally employs an inverse strategy, for instead of removing pieces of the image, he decides to cover certain areas which leave a partial view of the animals or landscapes represented. Here, nature is “rarefied”, hidden behind the representation or interpretation that is left.

For his work, ‘Paisajes Literarios’, Francisco Ugarte identifies and highlights fragments of Ernst Hemingway’s “The old man and the sea” where landscapes or a moment of contemplation is described. This gesture, which draws attention to the visual characteristic of narrative, also urges us to think upon the construction of nature from what is seen or from what is written.

For ‘Fragmentos Solares’ [Solar Fragments], Daniel Monroy Cuevas worked with images from books the artist chose, among other reasons, because all showed people or animals looking directly at the camera. Monroy Cuevas placed a mirror next to these selected images in order to photograph the geometric shapes resulting from the light and shadows at play. The technique uses the natural phenomenon of light to try to intervene in a space and time that once existed between the camera and the subject portrayed.

In ‘Sin Título (100 ml de Agua de Rosas Pueden Perfumar el Danubio’ [Untitled (100 ml of Rosewater Can Scent the Danube)] Irizar “profanes” the river by pouring in it a bottle of rose water, while rhetorically questioning whether it is possible that a small gesture that interrupts a natural course, is capable of perfuming—or transforming—everything.

For Moving and absence, Israel Martínez uses recording material of locations where humans are not seen and that have substantial sound activity and overlays those recordings to images of sport venues and people doing various sports. Thus, the narrative is composed of sounds that do not strictly correspond to the images that are matched. The dislocation between visual and auditory sources causes that the resulting landscapes have a rare quality, almost mystical.

Finally, in Diablo Cazador de Hombres [Man-Hunting Devil], Daniel Monroy Cuevas refers to the science fiction movie Predator, where a digital clock with extraterrestrial “numbers” marks the time remaining before a bomb planted by the predatory alien ends the world. In his video, Monroy Cuevas reproduces these digits and displays them on some curtain blinds. His clock, however, counts frames per second, a measure used for images, particularly in video and film; a gesture suggesting that the time span created by these means is different from real time. The piece also manifests the apocalyptic character of all science fiction, whose narrative equates the near future to the image of a city in ruins, that is to say, the return to its primitive state, to the chaos of nature. (Bárbara Cuadriello)