JakArt@2008 General Conference
1-    5 August 2008

Lassla Esquivel Durand

The Fragmentation: a Rereading of the Contemporary World

Contemporary art is constantly being judged. Sometimes its validity as an artistic practice is doubted. Other times it is judged because of its subversive or transgresive attitudes that result uncomfortable and impacts any social class.  Contemporary artists’ attitudes tend to question and critique set stereotypes and social paradigms. The insubordination to what is established has made possible the questioning and redefinition of these. Such paradigms have been infringed and there is no turning back, instead they must be modified in order to create new platforms and categories fit for the contemporary world. This constant struggle between the plurality of ideas and their legitimization is not where universal truths are sought, but rather where multiple perspectives are acknowledged.  

The search for these new perspectives drives artists towards a process of auto-determination and the deconstruction of their own existence. The elements that construct their environment are usually understood as a whole. But what happens when these elements transform themselves? They stop being a part of something and become independent, functioning as a whole in themselves. The fragmentation concedes towards a new sense, whether it is conceptual, formal, interpretive, or of any other kind, and in this manner yielding its autonomy.

Artists question the form in which their reality articulates itself; they seek to achieve a new way to confront it. They look for objects, symbols, or icons of any kind that merge the pre-established vision of the world and the values which they-themselves assign as new, according to their personal artistic process. From a fragment a new entity can come into being; this is the moment where reconstruction takes place from deconstruction.

How does this apply to Mexican artists and the exhibition Fragmentation?

Let´s start with

Santiago Borja

Santiago Borja (Mexico City, 1970) is an artist whose work besets around accidents: stains, spots, marks. An accident can become the origin of a fragment as a rupture; however, it may work as a genesis as well. The direction that the process follows is determined by whoever takes it on and his reception. The rupture can originate consciously or subconsciously, for different reasons.  Borja uses stains as an invitation to speculation and reflection, an aware intellection of the process.  He opens the window to the play of interpretation in order to infer forms or ideas that result familiar or simply harmonious. Yet, they are only pieces of a reality that we can identify and from which we can begin to contemplate our own traces of totality.

Manuel Cerda

Young artist (Mexico City 1972), who uses veils and ornamental forms to intertwine crude images of a reality we all live in; one which we only grasp in the measure of our convenience. His painting is the pictoric representation of man’s decision to conceal under veils and flowers the atrocity of its kind, in which it lives day to day. Cerda inserts tragic scenes full of violence in a context where even these fractions of reality appear to be out of place fictions. He fuses two antagonic conceptions to activate another that - because of its differences - must be independent from any trench or home’s living room in the world. He provides another way of visualizing war and of seeing a home’s embellishment without actually perceiving any of the two. Cerda makes human gaze the protagonist of his work.

Ruben Gutierrez

The work of Ruben Gutierrez has diverse resources and narrative principles that allow the creation of fictional atmospheres. From such, the author seeks, from a series of abstractions of the contemporary media culture, to create dramatic games that manifest this accumulation of spectacles, where what is lived in, or consumed, is separated in a series of autonomous representations and acquire meaning by themselves. Ruben Gutierrez uses the show as a keyword in his work; it has become the code for the interaction between individuals under the spell of the images and the media. 

Gutierrez’s pieces work with an ironic conscience about art and revolution as a phenomenon that offers comfort from the world’s complexity and banality.

Miguel Angel Madrigal

Madrigal (Mexico City, 1974) has explored diverse forms of manipulating both objects and materials. He has defied gravity; not only physical but also visual balance, and of course, the conventionality of artistic supports. This artist’s work questions the traditional functions, conceptions and visions stipulated on any object. In this manner, he plays with the transformation of masses, allowing them to evolve not only as a work of art. In addition, lets them change into new concepts and ideas that part from an object or function, which then after being intervened with, become completely unknown to themselves.

Quirarte&Ornelas

Anabel Quirarte (Mexico City, 1980) and Jorge Ornelas (Mexico City, 1979) are a couple of young artists who analyze their everyday lives and from them make a register. They present it according to how they live it, yet not according to how they see it. Their work is a detailed selection of objects, landscapes, sceneries, and circumstances that in the artists’ words define who they are: “that which makes up our everyday lives in different aspects: events, objects, spaces, our interaction with these and with ourselves”. It is for this reason that their portraits are a recurrent motif. Hence, Quirarte&Ornelas manipulate their reality by both  filtering and placing elements, which, may or may not be physical, but they articulate them according to their own vision of the world.

Ricardo Rendon

Ricardo Rendon (Mexico City, 1970) works with a wide range of means, ranging from sculpture and installations to media, sound, and video art. His work can be understood through the conceptual manipulation of objects, specially working tools such as wood, sandpaper, axes, cement, among others.

Rendon brings objects out of context by breaking them away from their original function, articulating them in illogical, even absurd, forms. He defies the concepts and ideas established on them. With this in mind not only does he question their utility, but also their integrity as a whole. Therefore, he creates instruments that when split and transformed, break away from themselves (whether it is formally or conceptually). “In the process of work, in the process of molding and changing the exterior nature of himself, man molds and changes himself- Ricardo Rendon.” He focuses on the making and emphasizes the elements. He zooms in and turns it around as a zoom out.

Pablo Helguera

Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a visual artist. He lives in New York. His work tends to present itself in unusual formats, imaginary get-togethers, phonogram recordings, exposition audio-guides, or nomadic museums. Helguera parts from historic research or from concerns related to art’s essence, the perception and role that culture plays in politics and society, combining literary, musical, and pedagogical strategies. Works by Helguera approach dilemmas and debates at a collective level without a solution, that manifest themselves in everyday life. However, on this occasion what is pertinent to this exhibition are his collages.

The collage is a narrative fragment that allows us to make an extensive invitation to other ideas that must not necessarily be present, yet are by association. Its parts keep the fractal form due to the occasion, but don’t remember their original whole; instead, they conserve the new autonomous form.

This is what the artists who conform the curatorial project do. Santiago Borja, Manuel Cerda, Miguel Ángel Madrigal, Quirarte&Ornelas, Ricardo Rendón and Pablo Helguera, through Galería Enrique Guerrero, present their ideas and each individually offers their vision on today’s world. The works of these artists posses self-arguments, but are connected and share concepts executed in a unique individual manner. The exhibition functions as a conceptual and formal dialogue between the distinct works, that as a whole, back-up a same thesis: Fragmentation as a creative process, in which the breaking of the compounds and elements of the whole, reaches artistic creations and new objects.  

Lassla Esquivel Durand