Afgang’06

„The biggest trip of my life was just going to start“
(Jack Kerouac)

Leaving a stage behind and starting another one. Facing something different. Living a process of initiation, of transformation. Sometimes it is about changes of great importance. In other occasions it is only about small living adjustments. All these changes and evolutions shape our life. Every change, or more precisely, every need for a change means a way of discontentment. Like in every creative task, we rethink the world and our relation to it because there is something, which irritates us, bothers us and consequently, we want to modify. Sometimes, the change is a journey, which becomes a metaphor of a research, an escape or a rediscovery of the self. This is a leitmotiv, which repeats in cinema, in art, in music and in literature. Not by coincidence, this is the point of departure of most of the road movies, in which the voyage becomes a metaphor of the transition to a stage of maturity, of the research for the unexpected, or perhaps of escaping from something. Thus, for Jack Kerouac and the beat generation, the travel meant the search for answers to the act of living, and at the same time, a way to run away from responsibilities…

„There is no place I’d rather be than this journey of discovery“
(Jamiroquai)

The voyage, in a physical and metaphorical sense, is an essential trait of the creative practice. One of the landmarks of modern art has been the search for its values in other places, which may be spatial, geographical, mythical or temporal. Every departure implies an experience in terms of life and knowledge. This is an essential part of “artists’ baggage”. In the 19th century, the educational trip to Italy was a must for European artists. In the same period, the fascination to Orient meant the attraction for the exotic. Very often, to travel to other lands becomes a journey to the inner self. The voyage can be a lonely trip as a form of self-knowledge (Richard Long, Ulay/Abramovic); it can be an encouragement, a provocation, a regeneration or the wish to be integrated in a different place (Andreas Gursky, Beat Streuli); it can be the “detonating” to follow up ideas or projects, which seem impossible (Joost Conijn, Simon Starling) or it can contribute to define a new social class of nomads, artists as passengers in transit, who live and approach his or her projects in this moving “in between” different places, different societies, different situations and different commitments.

I still don’t know what I was waiting for
And my time was running wild
A million dead-end streets
Every time I thought I’d got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet
So I turned myself to face me
But I’ve never caught a glimpse
Of how the others must see the faker
I’m much too fast to take that test

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Don’t want to be a richer man
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Just gonna have to be a different man
Time may change me
But I can’t trace time

(“Changes”, David Bowie)

The voyage can also refer to the end of a stage and the beginning of another one. For artists, the time in the Art Academy means a period of education, discussion and sharing with the other pupil privileged moments out of the efficiency that society claims to its members („Et in Arcadia Ego“, called Evelyn Waugh this time with big nostalgia in his novel Brideshead Revisited). The ending of the time in the Art Academy is also a moment of interrogation –not so much about oneself (we are not talking about teenager students) but about the artist’s role and their position in relation to society. This time in the Academy could be defined with the words of the Dutch anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in his book The Rites of Passage (1908), in which he examined what he called “life crises” and the ceremonies (or better, phases) that accompanied them: separation, transition and incorporation. In the transitional phase when the individual is neither in nor out of society, he or she exists in what van Gennep called a “liminal” state, in the threshold. And we can add, in a moment of change, of in-definition, of questioning and taking position both in personal and professional level.

Jesper Carlsen, Anders V. Hansen, Tine O. Jensen, Line S. Mengers, Karen Petersen, Kristian V. Svensson and Rikke Winther, the seven artists participating in the exhibition Afgang’06, are in this “threshold” of interrogation and taking position. The common denominator that unites these artists is that (apart from having done their education in the same art academy, Det fynskekunstakademi) from May onwards they will share the experience of leaving (the Academy) and in a broader sense, the idea of departure. „The biggest trip of my life was just going to start”, a quotation taken from the book of Jack Kerouac, On the road, summarizes the spirit of the exhibition, which is about accomplishing a period of education, of training and starting a new period, which implies a decisive moment of looking for a place –a space of one’s own from which to take part in a given reality- and also a place in the art world and in society. It is also a moment of interrogation: how is the art world? What are the function of art and the role of the artists? Which is the social status of artists? Can art fulfil a social function?

During the process of preparation of Afgang’06, artists not only have developed their individual works, but also they have discussed all these issues in a forum in Internet, where they have expressed their ideas in relation to art, their role as artists, their individual artistic projects as well as their worries in relation to some situations happening around them (like the controversy in relation to the 12 Muhammad cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten). The following are just some of the points of view that have been included in the forum. Thus, the situation of impasse by leaving the Academy was summarized by one of the artist with the following metaphor: „Maybe I’m more for going into something new than going away… but well, if you go out of a room you automatically enter a new one“. The seven artists participating in Afgang’06 understand their role through the engagement with society (“the role of the artist is a way to help people think in the real world. My objective is pretty simple I am trying to raise the level of consciousness in relation to aesthetic consummation. I think good art can have the ability not only to raise questions about it self, but raise questions about the way we see the world. I see an artist’s practice as research, not only researching the subject matter, but also the surrounding phenomenon including ones own subject”). As a consequence, for most of them artistic practice is a way of communication. This is the way it was expressed by another artist: “it is a field where you can talk about things in a way that is impossible with just words. The relation between society and art is very important. To be aware of what is going on around you. Then it might be possible to somehow add something that is «missing» in the world. I guess that is what art is about”.

“Art is a way of thinking about the world, art questions society,
art challenges passivity and stimulates action” (Manifest Blue Dogma)

Since a long time, artists don’t live out of the world and isolated in their studios. They are concerned, affected and worried about everything that happens around. In 1980, the UNESCO emphasized the importance of the role of artists in society. Nowadays, many artistic practices deal with reality, they are involved in other contexts and use other strategies, mechanisms, production and communication means different from the ones traditionally artistic. Their works deal with issues and situations, which have a direct impact in society, they comment and question, establish models and prototypes, parallel situations or social and economic tests in small scale. They give visibility to certain dynamics, evidence some mechanisms, show contradictions and, as a consequence, question –or invite us to question- our present and our relation to it.

Although their interests and works are very diverse, the seven artists who exhibit in Afgang’06 share a committed attitude.

Jesper Carlsen presents a nature, which responds to a meticulous construction. In his projects, animations or mechanisms constructed by Carlsen, nature and artifice come together in order to show the contradictions and the complexity of meanings. In Afgang’06, Carlsen projects an animation, which with acid humour shows a fly deeply attracted by a Dan Flavin light.

Anders V. Hansen takes the political Danish context, and more specifically, the minister of culture Brian Mikkelsen, as a departure for his work. Hansen creates a sound sampling with some of Mikkelsen’ statements about a canon for Danish culture. The ideas of Mikkelsen are sampled and projected randomly by a computer programme. By doing so, Hansen wants to dissolve the mechanisms of this canon and at the same time makes evident how Mikkelsen’s discourse depends on “common places”, and its apparent “innocence” hides an implacable intention of segregation.

One of the main concerns of Tine O. Jensen’s work is the feminine identity. The video she presents on this occasion works with two images full of meaning and symbolism: a horse and a woman. The moments before a race begins, with two female riders, as a concurrent, are shown in detailed close up and making evident a constructed set up in order to reflect all its symbolism and connotations.

Line S. Mengers’ work deals with social structures. She uses a wide range of media (sound, video or questionnaires, among others) in order to relate to specific contexts. In light of the graduation exhibition, Line Mengers has exchanged her drawings for elements required to settle her studio after leaving the Academy, such as a desk, a computer chair, etc. With this non-commercial way of trading, Mengers’ project reflects on the relativity of the economic value of art in society.

Installations and, more specifically, sound are the main working material for Karen Petersen, to let us rethink our approach to things. The work Petersen presents in this exhibition deals with communication. Therefore, Petersen installs a telephone on a plinth. The artists herself is phoning everyday and talks to the person on the audience who picks up the telephone. Thus a direct communication is established between artist and public, a direct communication based not only in the exchange of general information, but which goes in an intimate level, through the direct communication of personal experiences.

Kristian V. Svensson also uses different mean (like video, installation or performance) to develop projects which use public sphere as a place of intervention. For Afgang’06, Svensson has created an “Art Dating Room”, anounced in Internet and newspapers. This art dating room consists on a space with a telephone, which offers the viewer the possibility to stablish personal contacts.

Rikke Winther’s paintings and drawings deal with an inner world full of imagination and psychological connotations. The drawings and texts that compose Winther’s project for Afgang’06 shape a kind of emotional landscape related to feelings, personal emotions and romance.

This is a brief approach to the works and artists that take part in Afgang’06. For these seven artists, this exhibition is a real departure towards a new situation in which an educational stage comes to an end and another one, which demands a clear position as artists, starts. The transition is for them not only personal but also a matter of commitment. They work with specific contexts and with many different media in order to rethink our present, with all its paradoxes and contradictions. Probably the awareness of being in a transitional moment is part of their role as artists. Because only by looking at things with new eyes, they can renew perception and stimulate new ways of thinking. In this sense we referred to “the biggest trip” of Kerouac. Thus, to quote Björk seems relevant to finish this text just where a new beginning starts for Anders, Jesper, Karen, Kristian, Line, Rikke and Tine:

«Unthinkable surprises about to happen»
(Björk)

Montse Badia

Recording acts and, above all, their repetition, is a constant concern in the work of Peter Land (Aarhus, Denmark, 1966) by which the artist explores the basic conditions of existence and attempts to find sense in acts that appear senseless. The artist makes his recordings in strange, often grotesque situations, caricatured or taken to extremes to achieve a clearer definition of the issues he confronts. Land’s videos, drawings and installations usually show him in obsessively repetitive processes doomed to failure: dressed as an outmoded television showman unsuccessfully trying to sit on a stool, but falling time and again (Pink Space, video, 1995); trying to paint the ceiling in a room perched on a step ladder whilst unable to avoid falling again and again (Step Ladder Blues, video, 1995); possessed by strange dreams that place him in ridiculous, distressing situations (The Strange Dream Came Back Again LastNight, series of drawings, 1997); falling down an endless staircase (The Staircase, video, 1998); sinking with his boat in a lake (The Lake, video and photographs, 1999). Like an inconsequential, deliberately comical Sisyphus, Land falls, gets up again and falls once more, again and again, facing his fears in a permanent attempt to overcome them. As the artist himself once declared: “I figure that in my own work, through the recording of acts and their repetition, I’m trying to reflect some basic conditions of my own existence and perhaps to fill some sort of apparent meaning into the meaningless. Maybe this meaning is to expose the meaningless (…) A lot of my work is centreed on disillusion; the sense that meaning escapes you whenever you need it most; whenever you think you’ve understood the world as it is, and gotten things into the right perspective, all of a sudden something happens that undermines that feeling. Your world collapses, and you have to start all over again.”

By placing himself in situations that are clearly at odds with society’s norms, the artist seeks to revise or renew perceptions of himself or the social meaning of his occupation. Again, the artist describes himself in his own words: “In all my work, I try to isolate different aspects of my own self-perception. It’s like testing my own identity by means of reflections in the form of recordings of myself in different staged situations. These situations are often grotesque, caricatured or driven to extremes as a way of isolating and enlarging the issue, to crystallise and to mediate it as clearly as possible to myself as well as an eventual audience. I regard extremity as a way of focusing, or as the Danish painter Asger Jorn once said: ‘You either go to extremes or you don’t go at all’ (…) The main reason I use myself as a figure in my work has to do with the idea of narration. I would feel uncomfortable using someone else because I see my work very much as my own statements, and using someone else would feel like putting words into someone else’s mouth. I think it would blur the meaning of the work.”

Specially created for Espai 13, the installation Hasty Departure is a sculpture that might well be described as a way of freezing an impossible action that is completely out of control. It could easily be a scene taken from a film by Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd, or the most absurd, surrealist cartoon: a leg, held by a hand, is disappearing through the ceiling. At the other end, the hand holds a suitcase that has opened, spilling its contents over the floor. A hasty departure indeed.

Tiny doors invite us to cross a threshold that is completely impossible for us to negotiate. This work inevitably brings to mind the stories of Lewis Carroll (with whom Peter Land confesses himself to be completely fascinated), as well as Sir John Tenniel’s original illustrations for Alice in Wonderland, an important point of reference for this Danish artist. Like Carroll, Land invites us to enter a different dimension, where things follow a different logic to that dictated by the norms, a world in which the convictions and beliefs we thought to be firmly-grounded become transitory and unreliable.

In his work, Peter Land becomes an analyst of our times, lucid and melancholic in equal parts. The artist proposes himself personally as an object of study, with his body, his id, his doubts and his fears, to reveal the fragmentation, the dignity and the absurdity of contemporary people, as seen in the everyday images that are transmitted by our cultural codes and the media. As Renate Wiehager and Knut Nievers so rightly affirm in their text “Ground-less”: “ Wherever his eye turns in its search for a ‘unity’ behind the everyday world that would endow life with meaning – he comes to recognize his immanence. There is no redeeming answer to the question, asked repeatedly and treated as a Sisyphus-like repetition and repeated action: ‘What am I doing here?’”

Montse Badia
March 2005

The work of Thorsten Goldberg (Dinslaken, Germany, 1960) is characterised by minute detail, discipline and meticulous execution. Taking everyday points of reference, he produces comments that are light-hearted only in appearance, for underneath they are criticisms and precise observations of our times. His videos and installations often make use of ordinary bits and pieces transformed into objects of art. In his playful and very lucid way, the artist confronts the viewer with subtle displacements or differences that invite us to change our perception of things and to question the world in which we live and our relationship with it.

Created specifically for the Espai 13, Things are generally different behind closed doors is an installation in which two rather strange figures discuss their lives. A pad of cotton-wool (of the sort used for removing make-up) and a Smart car talk about their experiences, their ideals and their personal conflicts. The conversation is in words and also in images that are projected onto a kind of stage. The subjects talked about vary widely: city life as opposed to country life, relations with other people, different lifestyles and their implications, dress and appearances as indicators of belonging to different communities or social groups, the welfare state and its more specific personal implications, reality shows, the awareness and acceptance of belonging to a mediatised society.

All the dialogues are taken from conversations that the artist has overheard in trains, restaurants and other public places. So the two figures are certainly not exotic but merely two specimens of the present day. One of them is more homely and balanced, modest and disciplined, realistic and practical, and more or less satisfied with its situation in life. The other is more complex, unstable, over-the-top, sociable and with a tendency to make quick value judgements.

This is not the first time that Goldberg has created an apparently innocent story that as a public statement achieves the category of a diagnosis. As the artist himself says, “Simplicity or playfulness does not mean that a work is irrelevant. The fact that it uses simple symbols makes it universally comprehensible. (…) I feel that art has to have different levels. And the first level, or introduction, should, at least in my work, always have this atmosphere of playfulness, of harmlessness. I don’t want my art to be somehow awe-inspiring .” In his earlier work, Goldberg used a children’s game (Stone, paper, scissors) to make an intervention in the public space at Oberbaum Bridge in Berlin (the former frontier that separated East and West Germany), reducing the rivalry and political tensions to playground level. Curtain.mov was a red curtain (and the curtain round the stage inThings are generally different behind closed doors is a clear reference to it) that moved almost imperceptibly along a 60-metre-long transparent corridor linking two parts of the Martin Gropius building in Eberswalde. More recently, in Next Destination, Milk & Honey, he installed a bus stop in the centre of Heidenheim which each day announced one of the 2,000 destinations on the map of Schlaraffendland, the Accurata Utopia Tabula (c.1720) in which the cartographer Johann Baptist Homann reproduced in painstaking detail all the place names in the land of milk and honey, the Land of Cockaigne or the Land of Plenty.

Curtains that move, imaginary maps, children’s games, cars and cotton-wool pads that speak – Goldberg uses objects and situations from real life and transforms them into direct, punchy questions. He is never provocative or dogmatic but in an understated, humorous and seemingly naïve way he points to the subtle displacements or “differences” that put some fundamental values to the test.

Montse Badia
January 2005

For many years now, video has represented a very widely-used medium that has been entirely integrated into contemporary artistic practice, enabling artists to approach aspects of questions, situations, problems and representations relating to all the facets of the human being. If we consider the impact that the global public sphere and the mass media have on our reality, and how they determine the creation (or the manipulation) of the contemporary conscience, it is no surprise that today’s artists use and make reference to the mass media, to their formats and their strategies for constructing discourse.

As Claudia Giannetti notes, “contemporary thinkers such as Vilém Flusser, Götz Gorßklaus, Régis Débray and Dietmar Kamper, suggest that today, we as humans do not live exclusively “in” the world, nor “in” words, but rather “in” images: in the images that we have made of the world, of ourselves and of other people; and in those images of the world, of ourselves and of other people that are provided by technological media. “With the videosphere we are witnessing the end of “the society of the spectacle”. We were in front of the image, now we are “in” the image” (Regis Débray)”.

But what is the state of affairs in the realm of the image, at a time when the development of technology and the adaptation of new means of reproduction and simulation of reality for artistic uses have amplified the effects of the crisis provoked by the invention of photography? “It is not a question of tracing history back to the caves”, wrote Jean-François Chrevier and Catherine David in the catalogue for Passages de l’Image, an exhibition that was a reference to the decade of the 90s , “let’s admit that this history exists, and place ourselves in a specific phase of its development: the period of the “modern image”, a complex category that appears with photography and that takes up a network of interferences between certain modes (or models) of representation, of portrayal, and some types of pre and post photographic imaginary production again. (…) Moreover it is a fact (though is it one we must accept?) that in a society ruled now more than ever by the law of the spectacle, as Guy Debord wrote, the dominant model is the model of communication”.

Let us consider, therefore, the progressive advance of the image in movement, that is, image-time as the most generalised form of experience of the image in today’s societies. This type of image, made possible by the technical devices of production and distribution, creates an expanded perception time that is not unique and singular, but rather continual, and passing.

We all have the shared experience of going to the cinema, something that we do from a very yound age: we buy our ticket, we enter a space that we share with other people, the room darkens and the session begins on a big screen that fascinates us and invites us to enter into other stories, in other worlds. When we see a film, our eyes look up and down, and our mind transports us beyond itself to enter a world that is bigger than life itself.

Over a century of cinema has given form to our culture, and this is recognised by contemporary artists. Art and cinema have come together repeatedly throughout histoy: if in the early days of cinema, art exercised a clear influence on cinema (the avante garde cinematograpghic movements linked to the artisitic avante garde – futurism, expressionism, surrealism, etc, the positionings of the 60s and 70s with nouvelle vague, the North American underground, expanded cinema), today there is no doubt that the influence is in the inverse sense, and is linked to the need for art to move towards traditionally non-artistic discourse that is representative of different types of cultural manifestation. As a result, many contemporary artists work with cinematographic cliches that operate as models of representation or identity, from both a constructive and a symbolic perspective. With these works and installations, the museum space, which was traditionally static and presentational, is transformed into a projection space (in the broadest sense of the word). Therefore the museum becomes a species of cinema, or, conversely, distances itself from this approximation and emphasises its lack of similarity with those spheres of experience most closely related to mass consumption.

For many decades, the idea has dominated that modern and contemporary art must be presented in a neutral, well-lit space, the white cube that creates a distance between the object and its surroundings in such a way that, by decontextualising this object, it is elevated to the status of a work of art. This presentational format is being gradually superceded by the black box, which generates a space for projection and also for suggestion. In such a space, the audience experiences the moving images as enlarged images that stimulate the senses, while the distinction between the “I” of the spectator and the visual representation is blurred.

The museum, the art centre, the exhibition space, are undergoing a metamorphosis and becoming a species of cinema in which, as Boris Groys said quite correctly , “The need for darkness creates a state of invisibility that fuses with the structural impossibility of seeing video work in its entirety. This absence of visibility becomes a challenge for the spectator, and perception is transformed into participation”. As the artist Jeff Wall has summarised so well on several occasions, the museum must not only have a sun wing, but also a moon section that enables cinematographic experiences. And, we might add, an area for those works that have limited access to more established cinematographic distribution systems.

At this point, it is interesting to mention some examples of exhibitions or presentations that have taken place in recent years and that show this trait: White Cube/Black Box, presented in 1996 at the Generali Foundation in Vienna, included video pieces and installations from the Foundation’s collection; Black Box Recorder, a project organised in 2001 by the British Council, was a selection of video works by 12 British artists; the X and XI editions (1997 and 2002) of the Documenta in Kassel and the Venice Biennale (2005) included a proliferation of projection spaces with timetables of film and video showings. It is also worth recalling exhibitions such as Señales de vídeo (Video Signs) (Madrid, 1995), Monocanal (Madrid and other locations, 2003), Bad Boys (Venice and other locations, 2003), Video Times. 1965-2005 (Barcelona, 2005) or the incorporation of the Black Box section that from the year 2005 is to form a part of the programme of ARCO, the contemporary art fair held in Madrid.

“What the last several years of innovation in video work have taught the art community is that art made through video is still art”, wrote Dan Cameron , “art can be approached using more or less the same criteria that we might apply to a painting or a photograph. If this sounds contradictory, it is not, for the simple reason that the sense of the world, which is implicit in most experiences of actual film or television is not the same as the worldview promoted by art. One of the most striking differences between the two is in the degree to which art continues to support the belief that the world can be shifted, altered or represented according to the artist’s requirements, whereas most television and film productions support the notion that the artist-technician is a kind of technical wizard whose creations are meant to be enjoyed at the greatest possible remove from the site of creation. In a sense, this argument returns us to the heady challenges faced by the early videoart pioneers of the 1960s and ‘70s, who found that the viewer/producer was the ideal consumer of the fledging medium, because he or she could both absorb media positions and respond to them in kind. While this is a far cry from both the anesthetized television viewer of today and the rebel computer-hacker vilified by the media giants, it offers the slim possibility that in order to make optimal use of the new challenges opening up, the newly-democratized viewer is going to have to begin thinking more like an artist than at any other time in human history”.

*****
These are some of the reflections that mark the departure point of the project Sessió contínua (Continuous showing), a collective exhibition that brings together a selection of video works produced in the last five years by some of the most relevant and important contemporary artists in this field. The definition of the formal characteristics of this project is the result of reflection on the transformation of contemporary artistic practice and the need to explore different presentation formats in order to communicate artistic proposals that use elements and media belonging to other contexts. Sessió contínua consists of three different programmes of video projections produced by artists that are shown in a display especially designed for the occasion by another artist.

In this way, Sessió contínua is intended to reflect a consideration of the cinematographic form (or the moving image in general) as one of the most habitual forms of the visual experience today. The presentation devices by one of the artists shows the crossover of different disciplines, and reflects on the forms of presentation and exhibition as part of contemporary artistic discourse itself.

Its format means that the project Sessió contínua is a mobile, portable exhibition. It is no coincidence that the exhibition responds to a present shaped by mobility, flexibility and adaptability, yet without removing/ignoring its paradoxes and negative aspects, such as the standardisation and homogenisation that irrevocable dominates this age of globalisation.

Sessió contínua does not aim in particular to present a vision of the status quo in the here and now of contemporary art produced in this country, but rather aims, through the selection of 10 artists, to offer a compact, accurate vision of some of the most interesting work produced in the field of video in the last five years. It is no coincidence that the artists who are participating in Sessió contínua belong to the same generation, the generation that grew up with television and for which cinematographic and televisual experiences form part of the most basic day to day. Approximations to the eye-witness documentary format, clear references to narrative and cinematographic codes, reflection on the status of the image, hybrid creations with other fields of contemporary creation such as pop music and design, appropriations, gentle shifts, acidic social commentary and resistance strategies are some of the key notions defining the stance of the ten artists that form Sessió contínua.

The artist Xabier Salaberria has taken on the task of designing the architecture of the three projection spaces. Using a module-based system, Salaberria has looked to move away from both traditional museum furniture and the type of furniture that seeks to create a specific atmosphere or meaning, and has opted for materials that have been manipulated to as little an extent as possible and for structures of an austerity of appearance that claim no other role than that of their functionality.

In its approach to cinematographic presentation devices, Sessió contínua has been conceived as a species of “multiscreen”, in which three independent programmes of video works are projected, each grouped around a thematic axis, thus allowing the visitor to choose the desired “route” (in this case visual). In this way, the re-use of a type of cinematographic programming (the continuous showing) which is no longer used, emphasises the idea of expanded time, of the passage of time during which the spectator’s experience depends on his or her choice of route.

Programme number 1 is entitled “Construccions de la identitat i altres antimarques” (Constructions of identity and other anti-brands) and combines three pieces of work exploring the communicative capacity of the image in relation to the construction of the identity at a time when this is fundamental, namely adolescence. The world of advertising, fashion, design and pop culture also have a strong presence in these pieces, particularly in relation to an ever more media-manipulated present in which individuality is becoming a mass phenomenon, advertising no longer sells products but rather lifestyles, and identity is equated with images and products.

Dulces confidencias (Sweet Secrets) by Cova Macías, Un mystique determinado (A certain mystique) by Carles Congost and Nueva Ola o Desencert, subtitled A Time to Love and a Time to Die, by Joan Morey are the video works that make up this programme.

Cova Macías usually uses video and photographic media as a form of analysis of subjects relating to the construction of the identity in difficult age groups such as adolescence and youth. Macias generally works in close collaboration with the protagonists of her videos, who reveal their reflections and worries in front of the camera. These thoughts are often related to day to day contexts and are sometimes, in fact, very banal. In Dulces confidencias (2003) some young people tell the camera of their worries, their doubts and their needs, while the artist shows small flashes of everyday situations that complete their portraits.

Carles Congost usually works with photography, video and installations. A large part of his work follows a similar process to that used for commercial videos for television or the music industry, the difference being that Congost incorporates small elements that allow the spectator to see the ambiguity of the topics, always reflecting the subtleties of human relations and the values associated with certain ages. The culture of adolescence and the contradictions between the banality and the definition of roles is one of the principal themes articulated in his discourse. Un mystique determinado (2003) presents the story of a promising young footballer, who begins a career as a video artist. In the format of a musical (and with compositions by the group Astrud) and with the presence of clear references to the “Congost Universe”, the artist presents a story focussed on a decisive moment in a young person’s life, which at the same time becomes a sharp, ironic portrait of the art world.

Joan Morey’s main project is STP (an acronym from Soy Tu Puta, I’m your whore), an anti-brand that creates a deconstructive remake of the dynamic processes of the fashion world. In this remake, as the artist himself has written, of communicative deformations in the reflection, sampling, and/or frivolisation of “media forms” to turn them into constructive elements of the gears in his pieces, is where STP finds the crack that enables the establishment of a more intimate, private or complicit dialogue with the spectator. Nueva Ola o Desencert (2004), which bears the subtitle “A Time to Love and a Time to Die”, explores the distorsion and multiple interpretations of cultural concepts over time. In this piece, Morey intentionally blurs two styles, Nouvelle Vague and New Wave in order to reflect on generational changes and the way in which they result in re-adaptations or distorsions of cultural references from the recent past.

Programme number 2 is entitled “L’estatus de la imatge” (The status of the image) and consists of two pieces that consider the idea of the fundamental role of the image in our societies, along with evidence of the essential role of cinematographic references in the formation of “collective cultural thought”. Un/balanced 1 by Mabel Palacín and Walt & Travis by Martí Anson are the two pieces of work included in this programme.

The work of Mabel Palacín shows a preoccupation with the notion of image and its status in contemporary society, and the way in which this has penetrated our lives, blurring the lines between reality and fiction, with all the contradictions that this involves. Un/balanced 1 is described by the artist in this way: A series of characters divided into three groups live in three different houses, distanced from each other. They relate between themselves, but never with the people in the other two houses, which creates a strange network of connections that does not respect spatial limits. In Un/balanced, nothing is as it seems, nobody lives with whom they say they live and the characters exist through the relations, coincidental and shifting, that they are capable of maintaining. Un/balanced is based on close-up shots of the characters, who relate between themselves with looks, which are the vehicle for transmitting emotions and which give rhythm and meaning to the sequences, in the margin of temporal and spatial logic.

In the work of Martí Anson, the experience of the spectator is an esential element. In his photographs, videos and installations, Anson often confronts the spectator with irritating situations, or simply frustrates their expectations. Walt & Travis is a film shot in the USA that is entirely faithful to the codes and formats of the Road Movie, to the extent that certain shots from well-known films can be recognised, such as Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas. However, there is one difference: in his film, Anson emphasises and recreates all those moments or situations that never appear in Road Movies, such as the dead time in which the characters are in the car and are not talking, or the moments when the cars stop at a level crossing while waiting for a train to pass. In this way, by making that which is ordinary or to which we are accustomed strange, Anson makes us question that which seems predetermined.

Programme number 3 is entitled “Condicionaments socials, causes i casualitats i altres contradiccions” (Social conditioning, causes and coincidences and other contradictions) and contains five pieces that, in a very broad sense, talk of the present, of the contradictions and paradoxes that determine our relationships with others, of control mechanisms, of codes and predetermined roles, and of the strategies to avoid them or at least to show us their mechanisms.

Todas las Historias (All the stories) by Dora García, Arquitectura para el caballo (Architecture for the Horse) and Canicas (Marbles) by Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Determinación de personaje (Character Determination) by Antonio Ortega and Etc. by Tere Recarens are the videos included in this programme.

The work of Dora García takes the form of drawings, photographs, installations, performances, videos, sculptures, sound installations, writing diaries and projects developed on the internet. García usually explores the mechanisms of the artistic act to reveal the conventions implicit in any creative act. Todas las historias (2001) is explained thus “A man, a woman, recite aloud all the stories of the world. When they have finished, all the stories, all the men and all the women, all the times and all the places will have passed through their lips”. The video shows a performance in which the narrator recites infinite fragments of stories chosen from the thousand that can be found at http://aleph-arts.org/insertos/todaslashistorias/. In this way, Dora García is championing the power of the word over that of the image.

Fernándo Sánchez Castillo views art as a catalyst for social tension. In his work, he often explores the forms of surveillance and control exercised by state powers, and the forms of resistance to these acts, together with the fragility of symbols of authority, regardless of their legitimacy or origins. In the videos Arquitectura para el caballo and Canicas (2002), the artist harks back to Spain’s recent past, the final years of Franco’s dictatorship, in order to condemn, very subtly, the perversity of the architecture in the Autonomous University of Madrid: the building was designed to allow the riot police to enter on horseback in order to quell student revolts.In response, the students defended themselves by throwing marbles under the hooves of the horses to make them lose their footing.

The work of Antonio Ortega deals with social behaviour and dynamics. He often makes recordings which, with a strategy similar to that of a fable, take easily recognisable references in order to describe and exemplify situations. With an attitude of naivety, distanced from any kind of cynicism, Antonio Ortega observes from a perspective of perplexity and permanent doubt the mechanisms that define the dynamic of artistic production and its role in society. In Determinación de personaje (2000), Ortega takes up a joke belonging to the Spanish comedy duo Faemino and Cansado, which is recreated by an artist, Oscar Abril and a curator of exhibitions, David G. Torres. The chosen joke talks of art to bring to the foreground all the preconceived ideas and the “shared places” characteristic of the artistic system that, in this case, becomes a metaphor for, or an example of, the social system.

One of the most significant aspects of the work of Tere Recarens is the link established between its life cycle and artistic production, without forgetting the importances he places on the game and the sense of humour. Etc. (2002) is a video filmed in Estonia, where the artist again plays with the autobiographical device, in this case her name, Tere, which in Estonia means “Hello”. Recarens is the protagonist, although she is out of shot, of this video in which she addresses the different passers-by with a greeting that in this case is the artist’s name, in a way that causes surprise and disconcertion. Through this little anecdote, Recarens gently subverts normal perception and reveals the cracks through which it is still possible to carry out absolutely individual acts that are entirely removed from predetermined social codes.

Montse Badia
June 2005

For many years now, video has represented a very widely-used medium that has been entirely integrated into contemporary artistic practice, enabling artists to approach aspects of questions, situations, problems and representations relating to all the facets of the human being. If we consider the impact that the global public sphere and the mass media have on our reality, and how they determine the creation (or the manipulation) of the contemporary conscience, it is no surprise that today’s artists use and make reference to the mass media, to their formats and their strategies for constructing discourse.

As Claudia Giannetti notes, “contemporary thinkers such as Vilém Flusser, Götz Gorßklaus, Régis Débray and Dietmar Kamper, suggest that today, we as humans do not live exclusively “in” the world, nor “in” words, but rather “in” images: in the images that we have made of the world, of ourselves and of other people; and in those images of the world, of ourselves and of other people that are provided by technological media. “With the videosphere we are witnessing the end of “the society of the spectacle”. We were in front of the image, now we are “in” the image” (Regis Débray)”.

But what is the state of affairs in the realm of the image, at a time when the development of technology and the adaptation of new means of reproduction and simulation of reality for artistic uses have amplified the effects of the crisis provoked by the invention of photography? “It is not a question of tracing history back to the caves”, wrote Jean-François Chrevier and Catherine David in the catalogue for Passages de l’Image, an exhibition that was a reference to the decade of the 90s , “let’s admit that this history exists, and place ourselves in a specific phase of its development: the period of the “modern image”, a complex category that appears with photography and that takes up a network of interferences between certain modes (or models) of representation, of portrayal, and some types of pre and post photographic imaginary production again. (…) Moreover it is a fact (though is it one we must accept?) that in a society ruled now more than ever by the law of the spectacle, as Guy Debord wrote, the dominant model is the model of communication”.

Let us consider, therefore, the progressive advance of the image in movement, that is, image-time as the most generalised form of experience of the image in today’s societies. This type of image, made possible by the technical devices of production and distribution, creates an expanded perception time that is not unique and singular, but rather continual, and passing.

We all have the shared experience of going to the cinema, something that we do from a very yound age: we buy our ticket, we enter a space that we share with other people, the room darkens and the session begins on a big screen that fascinates us and invites us to enter into other stories, in other worlds. When we see a film, our eyes look up and down, and our mind transports us beyond itself to enter a world that is bigger than life itself.

Over a century of cinema has given form to our culture, and this is recognised by contemporary artists. Art and cinema have come together repeatedly throughout histoy: if in the early days of cinema, art exercised a clear influence on cinema (the avante garde cinematograpghic movements linked to the artisitic avante garde – futurism, expressionism, surrealism, etc, the positionings of the 60s and 70s with nouvelle vague, the North American underground, expanded cinema), today there is no doubt that the influence is in the inverse sense, and is linked to the need for art to move towards traditionally non-artistic discourse that is representative of different types of cultural manifestation. As a result, many contemporary artists work with cinematographic cliches that operate as models of representation or identity, from both a constructive and a symbolic perspective. With these works and installations, the museum space, which was traditionally static and presentational, is transformed into a projection space (in the broadest sense of the word). Therefore the museum becomes a species of cinema, or, conversely, distances itself from this approximation and emphasises its lack of similarity with those spheres of experience most closely related to mass consumption.

For many decades, the idea has dominated that modern and contemporary art must be presented in a neutral, well-lit space, the white cube that creates a distance between the object and its surroundings in such a way that, by decontextualising this object, it is elevated to the status of a work of art. This presentational format is being gradually superceded by the black box, which generates a space for projection and also for suggestion. In such a space, the audience experiences the moving images as enlarged images that stimulate the senses, while the distinction between the «I» of the spectator and the visual representation is blurred.

The museum, the art centre, the exhibition space, are undergoing a metamorphosis and becoming a species of cinema in which, as Boris Groys said quite correctly , “The need for darkness creates a state of invisibility that fuses with the structural impossibility of seeing video work in its entirety. This absence of visibility becomes a challenge for the spectator, and perception is transformed into participation». As the artist Jeff Wall has summarised so well on several occasions, the museum must not only have a sun wing, but also a moon section that enables cinematographic experiences. And, we might add, an area for those works that have limited access to more established cinematographic distribution systems.

At this point, it is interesting to mention some examples of exhibitions or presentations that have taken place in recent years and that show this trait: White Cube/Black Box, presented in 1996 at the Generali Foundation in Vienna, included video pieces and installations from the Foundation’s collection; Black Box Recorder, a project organised in 2001 by the British Council, was a selection of video works by 12 British artists; the X and XI editions (1997 and 2002) of the Documenta in Kassel and the Venice Biennale (2005) included a proliferation of projection spaces with timetables of film and video showings. It is also worth recalling exhibitions such as Señales de vídeo (Video Signs) (Madrid, 1995), Monocanal (Madrid and other locations, 2003), Bad Boys (Venice and other locations, 2003), Video Times. 1965-2005 (Barcelona, 2005) or the incorporation of the Black Box section that from the year 2005 is to form a part of the programme of ARCO, the contemporary art fair held in Madrid.

“What the last several years of innovation in video work have taught the art community is that art made through video is still art”, wrote Dan Cameron , “art can be approached using more or less the same criteria that we might apply to a painting or a photograph. If this sounds contradictory, it is not, for the simple reason that the sense of the world, which is implicit in most experiences of actual film or television is not the same as the worldview promoted by art. One of the most striking differences between the two is in the degree to which art continues to support the belief that the world can be shifted, altered or represented according to the artist’s requirements, whereas most television and film productions support the notion that the artist-technician is a kind of technical wizard whose creations are meant to be enjoyed at the greatest possible remove from the site of creation. In a sense, this argument returns us to the heady challenges faced by the early videoart pioneers of the 1960s and ‘70s, who found that the viewer/producer was the ideal consumer of the fledging medium, because he or she could both absorb media positions and respond to them in kind. While this is a far cry from both the anesthetized television viewer of today and the rebel computer-hacker vilified by the media giants, it offers the slim possibility that in order to make optimal use of the new challenges opening up, the newly-democratized viewer is going to have to begin thinking more like an artist than at any other time in human history”.

*****
These are some of the reflections that mark the departure point of the project Sessió contínua (Continuous showing), a collective exhibition that brings together a selection of video works produced in the last five years by some of the most relevant and important contemporary artists in this field. The definition of the formal characteristics of this project is the result of reflection on the transformation of contemporary artistic practice and the need to explore different presentation formats in order to communicate artistic proposals that use elements and media belonging to other contexts. Sessió contínua consists of three different programmes of video projections produced by artists that are shown in a display especially designed for the occasion by another artist.

In this way, Sessió contínua is intended to reflect a consideration of the cinematographic form (or the moving image in general) as one of the most habitual forms of the visual experience today. The presentation devices by one of the artists shows the crossover of different disciplines, and reflects on the forms of presentation and exhibition as part of contemporary artistic discourse itself.

Its format means that the project Sessió contínua is a mobile, portable exhibition. It is no coincidence that the exhibition responds to a present shaped by mobility, flexibility and adaptability, yet without removing/ignoring its paradoxes and negative aspects, such as the standardisation and homogenisation that irrevocable dominates this age of globalisation.

Sessió contínua does not aim in particular to present a vision of the status quo in the here and now of contemporary art produced in this country, but rather aims, through the selection of 10 artists, to offer a compact, accurate vision of some of the most interesting work produced in the field of video in the last five years. It is no coincidence that the artists who are participating in Sessió contínua belong to the same generation, the generation that grew up with television and for which cinematographic and televisual experiences form part of the most basic day to day. Approximations to the eye-witness documentary format, clear references to narrative and cinematographic codes, reflection on the status of the image, hybrid creations with other fields of contemporary creation such as pop music and design, appropriations, gentle shifts, acidic social commentary and resistance strategies are some of the key notions defining the stance of the ten artists that form Sessió contínua.

The artist Xabier Salaberria has taken on the task of designing the architecture of the three projection spaces. Using a module-based system, Salaberria has looked to move away from both traditional museum furniture and the type of furniture that seeks to create a specific atmosphere or meaning, and has opted for materials that have been manipulated to as little an extent as possible and for structures of an austerity of appearance that claim no other role than that of their functionality.

In its approach to cinematographic presentation devices, Sessió contínua has been conceived as a species of “multiscreen”, in which three independent programmes of video works are projected, each grouped around a thematic axis, thus allowing the visitor to choose the desired «route» (in this case visual). In this way, the re-use of a type of cinematographic programming (the continuous showing) which is no longer used, emphasises the idea of expanded time, of the passage of time during which the spectator’s experience depends on his or her choice of route.

Programme number 1 is entitled “Construccions de la identitat i altres antimarques” (Constructions of identity and other anti-brands) and combines three pieces of work exploring the communicative capacity of the image in relation to the construction of the identity at a time when this is fundamental, namely adolescence. The world of advertising, fashion, design and pop culture also have a strong presence in these pieces, particularly in relation to an ever more media-manipulated present in which individuality is becoming a mass phenomenon, advertising no longer sells products but rather lifestyles, and identity is equated with images and products.

Dulces confidencias (Sweet Secrets) by Cova Macías, Un mystique determinado (A certain mystique) by Carles Congost and Nueva Ola o Desencert, subtitled A Time to Love and a Time to Die, by Joan Morey are the video works that make up this programme.

Cova Macías usually uses video and photographic media as a form of analysis of subjects relating to the construction of the identity in difficult age groups such as adolescence and youth. Macias generally works in close collaboration with the protagonists of her videos, who reveal their reflections and worries in front of the camera. These thoughts are often related to day to day contexts and are sometimes, in fact, very banal. In Dulces confidencias (2003) some young people tell the camera of their worries, their doubts and their needs, while the artist shows small flashes of everyday situations that complete their portraits.

Carles Congost usually works with photography, video and installations. A large part of his work follows a similar process to that used for commercial videos for television or the music industry, the difference being that Congost incorporates small elements that allow the spectator to see the ambiguity of the topics, always reflecting the subtleties of human relations and the values associated with certain ages. The culture of adolescence and the contradictions between the banality and the definition of roles is one of the principal themes articulated in his discourse. Un mystique determinado (2003) presents the story of a promising young footballer, who begins a career as a video artist. In the format of a musical (and with compositions by the group Astrud) and with the presence of clear references to the “Congost Universe”, the artist presents a story focussed on a decisive moment in a young person’s life, which at the same time becomes a sharp, ironic portrait of the art world.

Joan Morey’s main project is STP (an acronym from Soy Tu Puta, I’m your whore), an anti-brand that creates a deconstructive remake of the dynamic processes of the fashion world. In this remake, as the artist himself has written, of communicative deformations in the reflection, sampling, and/or frivolisation of «media forms» to turn them into constructive elements of the gears in his pieces, is where STP finds the crack that enables the establishment of a more intimate, private or complicit dialogue with the spectator. Nueva Ola o Desencert (2004), which bears the subtitle “A Time to Love and a Time to Die”, explores the distorsion and multiple interpretations of cultural concepts over time. In this piece, Morey intentionally blurs two styles, Nouvelle Vague and New Wave in order to reflect on generational changes and the way in which they result in re-adaptations or distorsions of cultural references from the recent past.

Programme number 2 is entitled “L’estatus de la imatge” (The status of the image) and consists of two pieces that consider the idea of the fundamental role of the image in our societies, along with evidence of the essential role of cinematographic references in the formation of «collective cultural thought». Un/balanced 1 by Mabel Palacín and Walt & Travis by Martí Anson are the two pieces of work included in this programme.

The work of Mabel Palacín shows a preoccupation with the notion of image and its status in contemporary society, and the way in which this has penetrated our lives, blurring the lines between reality and fiction, with all the contradictions that this involves. Un/balanced 1 is described by the artist in this way: A series of characters divided into three groups live in three different houses, distanced from each other. They relate between themselves, but never with the people in the other two houses, which creates a strange network of connections that does not respect spatial limits. In Un/balanced, nothing is as it seems, nobody lives with whom they say they live and the characters exist through the relations, coincidental and shifting, that they are capable of maintaining. Un/balanced is based on close-up shots of the characters, who relate between themselves with looks, which are the vehicle for transmitting emotions and which give rhythm and meaning to the sequences, in the margin of temporal and spatial logic.

In the work of Martí Anson, the experience of the spectator is an esential element. In his photographs, videos and installations, Anson often confronts the spectator with irritating situations, or simply frustrates their expectations. Walt & Travis is a film shot in the USA that is entirely faithful to the codes and formats of the Road Movie, to the extent that certain shots from well-known films can be recognised, such as Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas. However, there is one difference: in his film, Anson emphasises and recreates all those moments or situations that never appear in Road Movies, such as the dead time in which the characters are in the car and are not talking, or the moments when the cars stop at a level crossing while waiting for a train to pass. In this way, by making that which is ordinary or to which we are accustomed strange, Anson makes us question that which seems predetermined.

Programme number 3 is entitled “Condicionaments socials, causes i casualitats i altres contradiccions” (Social conditioning, causes and coincidences and other contradictions) and contains five pieces that, in a very broad sense, talk of the present, of the contradictions and paradoxes that determine our relationships with others, of control mechanisms, of codes and predetermined roles, and of the strategies to avoid them or at least to show us their mechanisms.

Todas las Historias (All the stories) by Dora García, Arquitectura para el caballo (Architecture for the Horse) and Canicas (Marbles) by Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Determinación de personaje (Character Determination) by Antonio Ortega and Etc. by Tere Recarens are the videos included in this programme.

The work of Dora García takes the form of drawings, photographs, installations, performances, videos, sculptures, sound installations, writing diaries and projects developed on the internet. García usually explores the mechanisms of the artistic act to reveal the conventions implicit in any creative act. Todas las historias (2001) is explained thus “A man, a woman, recite aloud all the stories of the world. When they have finished, all the stories, all the men and all the women, all the times and all the places will have passed through their lips”. The video shows a performance in which the narrator recites infinite fragments of stories chosen from the thousand that can be found at http://www.doragarcia.org/todaslashistorias/. In this way, Dora García is championing the power of the word over that of the image.

Fernándo Sánchez Castillo views art as a catalyst for social tension. In his work, he often explores the forms of surveillance and control exercised by state powers, and the forms of resistance to these acts, together with the fragility of symbols of authority, regardless of their legitimacy or origins. In the videos Arquitectura para el caballo and Canicas (2002), the artist harks back to Spain’s recent past, the final years of Franco’s dictatorship, in order to condemn, very subtly, the perversity of the architecture in the Autonomous University of Madrid: the building was designed to allow the riot police to enter on horseback in order to quell student revolts.In response, the students defended themselves by throwing marbles under the hooves of the horses to make them lose their footing.

The work of Antonio Ortega deals with social behaviour and dynamics. He often makes recordings which, with a strategy similar to that of a fable, take easily recognisable references in order to describe and exemplify situations. With an attitude of naivety, distanced from any kind of cynicism, Antonio Ortega observes from a perspective of perplexity and permanent doubt the mechanisms that define the dynamic of artistic production and its role in society. In Determinación de personaje (2000), Ortega takes up a joke belonging to the Spanish comedy duo Faemino and Cansado, which is recreated by an artist, Oscar Abril and a curator of exhibitions, David G. Torres. The chosen joke talks of art to bring to the foreground all the preconceived ideas and the “shared places” characteristic of the artistic system that, in this case, becomes a metaphor for, or an example of, the social system.

One of the most significant aspects of the work of Tere Recarens is the link established between its life cycle and artistic production, without forgetting the importances he places on the game and the sense of humour. Etc. (2002) is a video filmed in Estonia, where the artist again plays with the autobiographical device, in this case her name, Tere, which in Estonia means “Hello”. Recarens is the protagonist, although she is out of shot, of this video in which she addresses the different passers-by with a greeting that in this case is the artist’s name, in a way that causes surprise and disconcertion. Through this little anecdote, Recarens gently subverts normal perception and reveals the cracks through which it is still possible to carry out absolutely individual acts that are entirely removed from predetermined social codes.

Montse Badia
June 2005

[Continuous sessions is a touring group show comissioned by Diputación de Barcelona, 2005]

Meticulous detail is one of the main features of the work of Sumi Maro (Gifu, Japan, 1954). In his gigantic enterprises he faithfully copies works that are milestones in the collective memory, making subtle additions that bring their points of reference and interpretations up to date. This is the case of The Battle of Issus (1529) by Albrecht Altdorfer (1480-1538), a splendid composition that recreates Alexander the Great’s legendary battle at Issus against the Persian king Darius (333 a.d. ). There are many anecdotes concerning this work, one being that it was one of Napoleon’s favourite paintings and he had it hanging in his bathroom. At present, it forms part of the collection at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich . Like Altdorfer, Sumi Maro spent more than three years painstakingly reproducing every minute detail of this not very large canvas (158.4 x 120.3 cm) in which – in tribute to its relevance today (and also to collectors of his own works) – he incorporates the images of a collector, the pianist and conductor Christian Zacharias, and of the artist himself, as figures in the battle.

Impressed by this painting from an early age on account of its striking composition and strong colouring, Christian Zacharias was in fact the catalyst for the piece since it was he who suggested this ambitious project to the artist. In Sumi Maro’s version, Dedicated to Albrecht Altdorfer Sumi Maro Shifts A. A. Soul from the Battle of Alexander to the Battle of Christian Zacharias , also titled The Battle (1997-1999), Zacharias becomes the face of almost all the people appearing in the battle. But it also represents the artist’s own struggle with himself. For the three years this work took, during which he produced a number of collages, studies and preliminary drawings, the painting came to have different meanings for him and, apart from its more technical aspects, acquired increasingly contemporary connotations.

His obsession as a copyist and also as a portraitist defines another facet of Sumi Maro’s art. He not only includes people close to him in his copies of historical paintings but he also produces numerous portraits in which the figures are women with whom he has a platonic love affair. Aoki and Fatiah are just two of the names of these muses that appear in successive series of paintings that are true devotional icons and mark different stages in his artistic work.

Aoki, dressed in her school uniform, appears on the quadriga carrying Zacharias in The Battle . This is one of the last appearances of this platonic muse who was a constant presence in many of Sumi Maro’s pictures painted over thirteen years. Sometimes he depicts her as the main figure; at other times, her portrait appears in the most unexpected places, such as the image on someone’s signet ring, a tattoo on an arm, or a picture within a picture.

The second of Sumi Maro’s masterpieces is based on Jan van Eyck’s famous Ghent altarpiece (1432). The ten small drawings and collages in the series titled Fatiah – Heiliger Ort in Gent I-X (Fatiah – The holy place in Ghent I-X) (2003) are almost like reliquaries containing details from the painting known as The Mystical Lamb in Ghent cathedral. These collages are another example of the artist’s very personal and certainly very radical relationship with the masterpieces of Western painting. He faithfully reproduces some of the details of the picture and sticks them on to envelopes that have been sent to him by post, together with small portraits of his muse Fatiah, who is present throughout the series. All this shows the artist’s open-minded attitude to the painting he takes as his starting point.

Finally, the small masterpiece Weg zu Fatiah V (Path to Fatiah) (2001) is a devotional icon and altar – almost a chapel – containing the motif from Leonardo da Vinci’s famous picture The Virgin of the Rocks (1483). The scene includes the portrait-apparition of Fatiah that announces, with a certain reference to Pointillism, the introduction of other “contemporary masters” ( Van Gogh, Gauguin, Lichtenstein, Klee, etc.) that the artist explores in other series, always of course with the presence of the muses that imbue his works with real significance – and with life, as he himself has declared.

Sumi Maro approaches the masterpieces of Western painting with total freedom, incorporating in them his own passions and obsessions as well as a certain sense of humour in order to bring them closer to the present day.

Montse Badia