Are you here?
Are you here? Vulnerability and emotions in the contemporary artistic realm.
[…] Giving in to haste is already having consequences on attention capacity, which decreases year by year due to the accelerated consumption of images that invade our daily lives. Every day, each user receives hundreds of inputs on their devices; attention becomes dispersed, and the quality of tasks suffers as they are now performed simultaneously. Hyperconnection causes a disconnection that can contradict the very fabric of the creative discipline. As Byung Chul Han expresses it: “Culture requires an environment in which deep attention is possible. This is progressively replaced by a completely different form of attention, hyperattention. This dispersed attention is characterized by an accelerated shift of focus between different tasks, sources of information, and processes. Given its low tolerance for boredom, it also does not admit that deep boredom which would be of some importance for a creative process”(1). When there is no time, the obligation to synthesize stifles concentration to the point that the result is a heap of tasks to be accomplished and standardized work. Access to information is democratic and circulates in all directions, but its consumption has become so instantaneous that it seems impossible to digest.
In response, the artist Santiago Talavera clings to horror vacui to operate from a critical standpoint, presenting hyperpopulated dystopian scenarios. In the bulk of his work, the juxtaposition and accumulation of images function as a mirror of a fragmented reality that must face the ecological and existential challenges of the present. As strata of a world that shares debris and dissects excess, in Geology of Humanity (2019) there is a noticeable inclination to short-circuit the superficiality of the system through the appearance of multireality accentuated by the use of collage. The painting subtly fragments, error is stimulated like a glitch, everything seems cluttered, overflowing. The evident sense of decay, emphasized by the presence of the ruined plane, points to a feeling of desolation or catastrophe, while nature peeks through as a last cry of hope before everything turns monochrome. What overwhelms us in his work is our own identity reflected, the certainty that, in this invasion of the multiple, the diversion of thought infiltrates and saturates the capacity to process information. The paradox is given by that hypnotic overwhelming that keeps us looking at the image and that, ultimately, holds the precise reception time for questions to begin to manifest. We could say that Santiago Talavera uses the aesthetics of excess to disturb all that commercialized imagery in which we are immersed, as it is from the prophecy of collapse that he manages to pierce our consciences: “In the face of current immediacy and modes of art consumption, I continue to bet on works that propose a more deliberate visualization and listening. We can still relearn to stop and use attention and concentration, which are windows of access to reflection, to our intimate space, and even to critical readings of our environment.”
We inhabit superabundance; we are excess. We do so without filtering our impact and, with this, we stoke the wavering not only of the mind but also of the Earth, which already suffers the physical consequences of this new era of the Anthropocene. In the same way that Santiago Talavera points out the effects of our excesses in almost apocalyptic scenarios, where the glimmer of hope seems to lie in reclaiming a habitat shared by all beings embraced by nature.
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(1) Byung Chul Han. La sociedad del cansancio. Herder editorial. Barcelona, 2012. P. 249
On Dévoiler le monde
Dévoiler le monde. Works by Andrés Fernández and Santiago Talavera. Galerie Christian Berst. Paris
Every encounter is an adventure, or at least a gamble, and the encounter proposed by Graciela García in “Dévoiler le monde. Works by Andrés Fernández and Santiago Talavera” turns out to be a winning bet. Firstly, because it reveals a connection between two works that seemed destined never to meet “physically” at first glance. Secondly, because however absorbed each may seem in its individuality, it is precisely their juxtaposition that appears to “open” a door of access for us.
When two trajectories meet, they may annihilate each other or, magnetized by the same pole, repel: this can be seen in numerous collisions, thoughtless or simply lacking in raw material (mediocre works).
Here, the encounter is meticulous, and if it seems so well-conceived, discreetly, by the director – we thank Graciela García for going against her time – it is because the “raw material” is appropriate.
You can lean towards A. Fernández or S. Talavera, this is a personal matter, but obviously, this is not what G. García proposes: rather, (for those who prefer one or the other), to better understand this preference. And for those who appreciate both: to find, in each of their bodies of work, a third creation, formed by pieces of one and the other, with each seeming to subtitle the other.
From S. Talavera, we think of loose pages from a vast atlas, soiled, torn pages that no human (or animal) eye will read: useless archives for a memory that cannot fit into any time. Time has flown, leaving space orphaned: here places seem to cry out that they don’t know, or no longer know, where they come from, whose children they are. Because also (after a cataclysm – or even not: the simple slipping of beings and things, the slipping of the world into a foreseen, announced paralysis) time breaks here, shattering into rubble, like glass whose fragments travel, carried by the wind. But this wind itself, what is it then but the breath-witness that once burst forth: with contemporary meticulousness (sometimes approaching “licking”), yet translating a somewhat romantic taste for beauty, the resonance of ruins – the work of S. Talavera (what is shown to us in this encounter) is like a chronicle that tells nothing, I mean the effect of the breath of the end of times.
Life here is no longer capable of restarting the “carousel” of the world (not even sending a rocket into the future): empty “attractions” abound, as if the heart of the world had stopped, because there was no longer a reason to make life a celebration (even a sad one). Indeed, there is a terrible “wound” (title of a striking drawing, where a crater is displayed like a wound in the flesh of the world) preventing any joy, but all of Talavera’s art is to leave the viewer completely incapable of saying whether this “wound” is the wounded body (the ultimate catastrophe), or if it is the body itself (then there is no catastrophe, life itself is this catastrophe). Memento mori perhaps, but painted with such strange gentleness, such a curious way of “letting Death rest” (as one lets the dough rest to make cakes lighter), that one finally doubts if this work speaks the language of the future, if it wants to be “prophetic,” or rather (I think), if it refers to some initial big bang – and then the aerial debris covering this work would be the pieces of the primordial Light broken at moment “t”, traveling, like cosmic waves, throughout the universe.
The image then comes from this “silent catastrophe” that would be the cosmos itself – by the grace of an oxymoron that might be, just an effect of language bewildering our minds, hardly able then to grasp both ends of the rope.
Some would say the Image is false, arbitrary; but I have an excuse: it came to me, not so much from S. Talavera’s work, but from A. Fernández’s. As if he (I was saying) “subtitled” the other. With Fernández, indeed, it is the frenetic writing of a genuine index of the World-Book that we are witnessing. An index with letters and numbers, or simple lines but always aiming to help the inhabitant of the World (and undoubtedly A. Fernández first) to orient themselves. It is not surprising (as G. García informs us) that Fernández considers his GPS to be alive, truly endowed with emotion. For it is the Trajectory of anything (and above all in the Trajectory of each person) that this work focuses on: to fix it, to set boundaries, especially to give it (there lies its beauty) its enigmatic wandering.
The two instrumentalists say that perhaps when one listens a bit more, it is possible to perceive the original background noise for one – the music of the spheres for the other. And it is the art of conductor Graciela García to make both concert instrumentalists heard – for the greatest pleasure, and the greatest recognition of the music lovers.
Manuel Anceau. July 2023
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Shipwreck With No Spectators
Exhibition El pasado habrá sido un planeta extraño
There are forms of “poetic justice” that take on a sinister dimension (both familiar and rendered desolate due to repression), as if an ill-fated destiny were condemning the catastrophe underway to invisibility. The ghost doesn’t reappear or disturb the fantasy, and it is not a case of a “patriarchal logos” (á la Shakespeare) that cries out for revenge as a consequence of the betrayal of blood ties; rather, what occurs is a lack of an “event,” an asymptomatic standstill, if you will excuse the paradox. In the autumn of 2020, after postponing the exhibition Hauntopolis in the Art Center Tomás y Valiente in Fuenlabrada (planned for the previous spring), we decided to exhibit the pieces for one week, in a moment of “apparent” de-escalation of the Covid-19 pandemic. We had selected specific works from Santiago Talavera in which he addresses issues like the ecological crisis, animal welfare, and what could be described as an aesthetic/ethical fight striving for global justice. Drawings, paintings, and an impressive art installation (in which there was a wall marked with the phrase “We are only apocalyptic so that we can be mistaken,” from Günther Anders) had been distributed throughout the space in order to provoke collective thinking about the dire situation in which we currently find ourselves. The exhibition was never inaugurated. That is to say, that with the exception of those who set it up, those in charge of the center, the artist, and the curator, no one was able to wander through the space and observe the works of art on display. The “lock-down measures” imposed zoom logic, the “vicarious experience” of a virtual tour which, at the end of the day, barely generates any critical intensity.
Calamities can magnetically attract other disasters. Shortly after, Talavera’s studio flooded and many of the works from the cancelled exhibit suffered damage. The artist himself told me that he considered his “invisible” show a kind of “catastrophic meta-narrative,” and that when he saw that some of his works were literally floating in the water, he sank into a justified dejection. It was as though all his artistic meditation about the end of all ends had materialized in a subjective demolition. He had to tap into his last reserves of energy to create “something with that,” conscious of the difficulty or even the impossibility of rhetoricalizing the situation.
Since then, Santiago Talavera seems to have adopted the concept of art as a language of suffering, along with a conviction expressed by Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory, which states that the appearance of “reconciled” art must be broken by a heterogenous experience in order to literally “allow debris of experience” to create a different function and aesthetic effect. With admirable courage, this artist rescued and restored his ruined works of art, undertaking work that he associates with Paul Virilio’s concept of “the original accident.” In an intuition I had while simultaneously listening to Talavera while I was reading Athanasius Kircher, I realized that, more than a Noah’s Ark-style flood narrative, what he does is work with a determination that is more forensic in nature than archeological. On the fragments of a wall he had to knock down, he creates hypnotic drawings in an attempt to make that which is catastrophically connected visible, such as the connection between the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings and a meteorological phenomenon in London.
We stand before a shipwreck with no spectators, where we cannot sweetly contemplate, as Lucretius would, how the ignorant suffer in a cruel world. Nor do we feel that our relationship with Nature can be restored through a seclusion from the world to help us reach the golden cross on the mountaintop. Romantic sublimity has been (perversely and joyfully) desecrated by contemporary shapelessness, and the expansion of cynicism affects even nostalgic feelings. Santiago Talavera doesn’t undertake the Grand Tour in the manner of Goethe in order to study volcanoes; for him, the eruptions are a sign of the destruction of the world in which we live (or survive); Neptunism is of little importance when we are witnessing the disappearance of permafrost. The most worrisome part is that many politicians, as well as many inhabitants of this planet, refuse to change their lifestyles and even deny that we are in a critical situation, transformed into subjects that refuse to see, such as those blind, superstitious people against whom Diderot railed.
In this Gabinete de Dibujos exhibit, Santiago Talavera presents his work Reinventing the Show, an extraordinary drawing of an empty theater which looks as if a meteorite has hit it, surrounded by various eruptions. Our gaze is “located” on the stage as if we were the actors in this disaster; from this perspective, we can also see a bird attempting to flee. Talavera began thinking about this piece during the months of “successive cancelations” of Hauntopolis; he recovered a photograph of a revolving theater from somewhere in his archives and finally managed to give solid form to the ghost. What is on display here is not melancholy in the style of baroque theater, nor is it a mere realist conflict (with that bourgeois society that barely perceives the rumor of historical conflict from the comfort of its home), but rather a sort of theatrical interruption (in the Brechtian sense) that attempts to leave catharsis behind, using alienation to provoke thought and possibly achieve solidarity.
In a conference he gave in CENDEAC in May 2020 (in the cycle “The End of the World. An Agenda for Another Planet”), Talavera defined his work as “preventative actions.” His apocalyptic visions have absolutely no intention of collaborating with the tanato-political discipline, nor do they seek to reincarnate Cassandra’s fate. What Talavera does is to subtly detail the catastrophe (which for Benjamin is embodied in the fact that the worst “continues to occur”), even distributing magnifying glasses around texts and drawings to emphasize the need for us to become more involved spectators. In his paintings, he introduces glitches to lend credence to the productive dimension of error. He likewise undertakes fascinating détournements of historical images, as in his piece created from photographs of the Cuban “missile” crisis.
Santiago Talavera’s apocalyptic imagery recedes dialectically; for instance, in his work No More Dystopia (2020), he attempts to place a limit on wallowing in disaster. The spirit of “fatalism” is subjected to a mise en abyme, although it is difficult for him to rid himself of the frustration of having exhibited his work without anyone seeing any of it. The anomaly of Hauntopolis seems to be in line with the speculation of “a world without us,” illustrated, as Talavera pointed out to me, by that scene from Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), in which works of art are in the hands of powerful “bunkerized people,” destined not to be looked at. Capitalist realism takes on an impressive allegorical reduction in that “state of exception.” From the archeology of the flood and by positioning himself in a “forensic” manner, Santiago Talavera has painstakingly drawn terrible scenes (such as that fragment of a wall which shows a classic theater in which an empty chair stands out, a chair which will, in the manner of Beckett, grant no one a place to rest), not to sublimate disaster, but to remind us that “there are one hundred seconds left until midnight.”
Fernando Castro Flórez
A world without us.
[Notes on the ambiental-utopian imaginary of Santiago Talavera]
Text for Hauntopolis
“We are—like in the 19th century—living on the great crossroads of a total distrusts on institutions; but now utopias are created by marketing, and it is reality itself that creates its own distopias.”[1]
Among the many reasons for the advent of “accelerationism”[2] we shouldn’t dismiss those social pathologies that have emerged from the systematic distortions of the conditions of communication. “In the age of globalisation and the web’s “u-topicality,” time is increasingly conceived as capable of compressing, or even of annihilating, space.”[3] Space “contracts” virtually by effect of the speed of transport and communication. We know that there’s always something outside a media. Each media constructs a corresponding zone of immediacy, of the unmediated and transparent in contrast with the media itself. From our flat’s windows we’ve moved on to the windows of computers, from the ways of dwelling to the ways of computing,[4] in a mutation of what we perceive as “outside” but also in a complex game of transparency and opacity. The (presumed) age of access is nothing but an economy of (supposedly) “authentic” experiences.[5] Perhaps our “acceleration” is no other thing but the sedentary bogged-down binge-watching of the ubiquitous catalogue of home shopping networks in a time which is manifestly complex or, to put it simply, out-of-joint.[6]
To approach Santiago Talavera’s work, which is, as Noemí Méndez aptly notes, also a plastic activist,[7] entails also a raising of awareness about his radical speculative interests, but above all else it reveals an aesthetic strategy which he has articulated as a critical reaction within the bosom of a “culture of the now.”[8] In his works he pays constant attention to landscape; fascinated by Patinir, by Hiroshige’s visions of Fuji-san, enraptured admirer of Friedrich The Sea of Ice[9] (an hypnotic condensation of the Winter Journey which leads, explicitly, to the shipwrecking of all hope), taking romanticism as a cultural current very much alive, without falling notwithstanding into picturesque sublimations. “In one of my drawings, The Point of View, I imagined—says Santiago Talavera—Petrarch, walking up to the top of the Mount Ventoux once again, and seeing an objectified nature of fluoride colours where the stones looked like candy.”[10] In his prodigious and obsessive paintings there’s a constant disjointness of the logic backdrop-figure as well as a delight in miniatures as if reality would have been consumed into a uncanny diorama. Our gaze is entrapped inside strange angles or, to employ a barthesian term, in fascinating punctualisations: art touches because of its details.[11]
Santiago Talavera has related his plastic methodology with the passage of “Las babas del diablo” [“The Devil’s Drool”] by Cortázar (which inspired, to a certain extent, Antonioni’s Blow Up) where photographs are amplified several times and also to an interest for haikus and the Japanese garden. In some occasions he has mentioned that his “hyperzoom” aesthetic has something to do with the fascination that he experience before that scene in Blade Runner where Detective Deckard uses a machine to gain access into a photograph, giving a third dimension to the image, suggesting that “certain images hide crucial details.”[12] We visually inhabit a “stage-managed” space which seems to reveal the fractal dimension of nature where macro and micro elements interchange their qualities, forcing us to accept the truth that one derives from the title of one of this artist’s exhibitions: Que el destino de las cosas se decida en lugares pequeños [Let the fate of things be decided in small places] (Galería Blanca Soto, 2005). Santiago Talavera can be interpreted as a pointillist painter of time, capable of bearing witness to ruptures and continuities, unfolding an imaginary that gives cohesion to the heterogeneous and even to the pulverized.[13] His landscapes, between paradisiac and dystopian, conjuring up the excesses of Brueghel’s or Bosco’s imaginaries, have something of that baroque allegory, that is, of a staging of sadness, leaving us as astounded spectators before the shipwrecking of the world.
In an article titled “The Great Consolidation of Power,” which commented upon the multiple disruptions brought by the year 2010—the financial collapse of Greece, the cloud that came from Iceland, covering the skies of Europe and the great petrol spill in the Gulf of Mexico—Ross Douthat, think-piece contributor for the New York Times, wrote: “The panic of 2008 happened partly because the public interest had tied itself so much with private interests that the later couldn’t allow themselves to fail.”[14] We are marked, in every sense, by catastrophes, from the shipwrecking of the Prestige to the disaster of Fukushima, in a planetary collapse that has also consequences on the “aesthetic bubble.” In a way we are living a “Korean experience” (hyperconnected, but on the edge of suicide), frenetically stirred by nothing, addicted to the gangnam style. “The South-Korean mind—notes Franco “Bifo” Berardi—has reconfigured itself in this artificial landscape and has entered without problems into the digital sphere, with a low degree of cultural resistance if we compare it with other populations of the world. In a social space emptied out by military and cultural aggressions, the Korean experience is defined by an extreme level of individualisation and, simultaneously, it is directing its steps toward a complete rewiring of the collective mind.”[15]
When History seems obsolete or a mere spectral repertoire, perpetrating the dismantling of the common goods as carried out by neoliberal egoism,[16] it becomes difficult to recuperate the critical impulse and it might even seem that the utopian is absolutely precluded. The horror vacui operates, in Santiago Talavera’s work, [17] as a reaction to that history smashed to pieces. In his works he displays surprising accumulations and superpositions, making use of collage, “simulating” the glitch. One must understand that—planned—vertigo of juxtapositions in a ludic manner,[18] like an exercise of immersion into a present which offers simultaneous situations. “We live—notes Santiago Talavera—in a world of copies of copies, in a multi-referential and vertiginous world which tends toward accumulation.”[19] This artist of the hybrid, as I’ve indicated, is attracted by the detail, sucked in by the wound. One has only to contemplate that drawing, explicitly entitled The Wound (2015), where it seems like the pain of the animal could be mitigated by adamantine perfection, to understand that this artist doesn’t look for “pamphleteering” solutions but rather keeps always an enigmatic coefficient. In his fragmentary discourse, manifest in his beautiful miniature gardens, images are always in movement, broken-and-rebuilt, cut up and placed in theatrical arrangements borne out of the consciousness that there’s no such thing as a self-sufficient totality.[20] He resorts, cunningly, to inverosimile particularisations, avoiding a delight or enthusiasm at a distance, showing us an edulcorated and, ultimately, bitter landscape.[21]
“We arrive too late, strutting about the stage of the already experienced, the already given: the performance already finished.”[22] Without a doubt the poetics of Santiago Talavera denotes a melancholic undercurrent, which results from a backward glance at lost paradises[23] as well as from a nostalgia of the future.[24] His is a poetics based on calamity and defeat, nearing the register of science fiction or the tone of films like David Lynch’s Lost Highway where present and future blend together, or in the dystopian visions of Blade Runner. Let us recall the phrase “Then we are stupid and we will die” which Pris says, one of the four replicants of Ridley Scott’s film who escaped to the extraterrestrial colony and came back to the Earth to meet the only person that could prolong his life, the God of Biomechanics, the executive director of Tyrell Corporations, who created the body and mind of the Nexus generation. To think today of the multiple catastrophes that devastate us (in the environment, in the fabric of our social well-being and across our education systems we are experiencing an unimaginable devastation, suffering beyond descriptions) requires new methodologies. “Semiocapitalism—I quote Berardi again here—has infiltrated itself into the nervous cells of conscious organisms, inoculating them with a thanato-political logic, with a morbid sense penetrating our collective unconscious, our culture and sensibility; this is the obvious effect of sleep deprivation and a direct consequence of the stress imposed upon our attention.”[25] The franticness of forced socialisation reconfigures or, rather, keeps subjectivities available. Economic obsession provokes a feeling of constant mobilisation of the productive energy. According to Jonathan Crary, this is the form of contemporary progress: the ruthless appropriation and domination of time and experience, the ruthless colonisation of sleep.[26] The works of Santiago Talavera are at the same time, oniric and extremely real, dystopian and concrete, laid out in a masterful game of scale, imposing, with their forced perspectives, a sensation of anomaly.[27] Hito Steyerl has pointed out that the vertical perspective (hegemonic in the world of videogames and also in most contemporary audiovisual productions) integrates military, surveillance and entertainment uses.[28] The displacement of Santiago Talavera’s video-musical Cortar por lo sano [A Clean Break] is, to a certain extent, a drone journey which elevates us as much as it throws us down into a complete defeat, continuing with that interweaving of the sublime and the infraordinary which is so characteristic of his imagination.
“The theme of the untamed paradise—notes Óscar Alonso Molina—which banishes us is a recurring motif for radical subjectivism. Talavera establish himself within this long tradition, introducing new age-specific aspects of a ecological nature and that new gestaltic consciousness which locates man in the middle of a complex ecosystem, in an ecological niche in equality of conditions, but with greater responsibility.”[29] But this artist of the sublime doesn’t find himself in a tempestuous sea but—to put it provocatively—in Chernobyl.[30] We perhaps need a new cartographic-landscaping process to understand a world dominated by a “cruel aesthetic.” Santiago Talavera tries, relentlessly, to think the world, allegorising the disasters of capitalism,[31] at a time when neuro-totalitarianism is taken as an unavoidable and impending possibility, in an age hit by waves of post-truth tsunamis and riddled by complete informational opacity. Consparanoia has profound roots in our world, as if the inheritance of the school of suspicion were the “addiction” to detective narratives. “If detective stories—remarks Ferrán Barenblit and Cuahtémoc Medina in the catalogue of the exhibition about Forensic Architecture that they curated in 2017—had a central role in producing the imaginary of surveillance society as a product of a kind of rational police magic, the system of government of our age finds in the media staging and the investigation entertainment and in forensic trials (such as those of TV shows like CSI) one of its greatest consense-producing theaters. It refers to a world where the judiciary process (and practices such as the public exhumation of mortal remains) has turned into an ever-present passage of the experience of the present, just as the extended privatisation of violence as a mode of production around the world.”[32]
Eyal Weizman, leader of the forensic architecture project, speaks of how they used smoke clouds produced by bombs as an architectonic testimony. “Those clouds are in themselves the limit concept of architecture, since they reveal something essential about it. In the first place, the cloud originating from the bomb is composed of steam and dust from all the materials that made up the building (concrete, cast, wood, plastic, textile, drug, remains, humans). It is a building in a gaseous state.”[33] Weizman manages to take stock, in a critical and extremely lucid key, of the Théorie du nuage of the Art Historian Hubert Damisch: we move through the landscaping of the 16th century to the military systems of the brutail border that Israel has build up with Palestine. The paradox is that to have one’s head in the clouds is not a synonym of “digress” but, on the contrary, of making a point—barthersian pun intended— on the criminal dimension of political power. Santiago Talavera has drawn, with an impressive minuteness, a detail from the eruption of Indonesia’s volcano Tambora as an example of our accident-ridden world; those volcanic clouds are signs of the contemporary disaster, elements that this artist analyzes with a “forensic precision.”
The brilliantly catastrophic imaginary of Santiago Talavera,[34] characterised by a distrust toward the flow of the world, leads to the conclusion that we are a plague.[35]; As Walter Benjamin warned in the final considerations to The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, that man has turned its own self-destruction into a spectacle of the highest standard. In the works of Santiago Talavera man doesn’t appear—only the spectator remains or the point of view where he would to place himself. “Because we are no longer there. Our cultural remains stand, piled up, absurdly mixed up and devoid of meaning: the great and the dreadful are by now indistinguishable, though pessimism rules above it all. We contemplate the last scene: the world goes on without us (the curtain doesn’t fall).”[36] What happens is no longer a slow cataclysm[37] but an accelerating catastrophe. It isn’t only that the world is a (memoryless) museum, a dispositif (gestell in the heideggerian sense), which exhibits everything while at the same time it excludes us,[38] but that what remains is a veritable junkyard. Santiago Talavera appears like a speleologist or cartographer of the human garbage dump, contemplating our abandoned objects,[39] the derelict traces of our consumerist world where products come from the factory with “programmed obsolescence,” the abject accumulations of an age defined by the exponential growth of the waste disposal industry.
Santiago Talavera warns that all landscapes entail a collective portrait[40] and, in his case, what he shows us is the uncanny (in the freudian sense, something familiar that becomes strange by way of repression) as in those drawings of Santiago Talavera filled with rotting bodies.[41] Many of his works are disturbing, gifted with a rare power of seduction, but at the same time affording a bittersweet aftertaste, an impression brought about by something undefined, like a throbbing of suspense.[42] We have been—pun somewhat intended—suspended, remaining only in absentia. In his magnificent and disquieting drawings, developed as prolonged experiences of time,[43] he sediments his experiences[44] and gives us allegories about the need for spaces of dwelling, tracing houses which are perhaps in need of a heartening drive of hope.
As Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro note: dystopias only proliferate.[45] Santiago Talavera, in a truly self-critical turn (taking certain inertias of the catastrophic perspective in a dialectic manner), composed a piece where some workers (in a singular re-apparition of the human figure) struggle to rebuild a gigantic HOLLYWOOD sign to then, in truth, force the sentence NO MORE DYSTOPIA. Perhaps this artist wants to avoid Laocoonte’s destiny, without forgetting that any gift can be poisoned, but understanding that an overdose of omens is somewhat counterproductive. The pyknolepsy of the worse can end up in a lullaby and critical discourse and accomplish, along the lilts of a letany, the function of a mere accompaniment to the great unfolding of the the same always. Even if we are etherised by a scopic narcolepsy “other things” apart from the pre-cooked can take place. “Art capable of bearing with its destiny must be able to propose a short-circuit in the cycles of the “already seen” so that, at the same time, it doesn’t redound on another opportunity for us to witness the vision—behind the screen—of the Accident. An aesthetics of failure worth paying attention would have as its mission quitting this collective paranoia as the catastrophic sublime. Before the epilepsies of art, absorbed by the porn psychophonies of having nothing to see due to an hyperexcess of visibility, against an art whose thirst of events leads it to understand the real as a stammering of the obscene and the hyperbanal, only an aesthetic of ellipsis is possible, a strategy of terrorist bombardment, an art of rejoicement before that Real which ignores us before our very eyes.” [46]
Mark Fisher, an author of Santiago Talavera’s devotion, pointed out that the dystopia of the 21st century is not only something that was imposed upon us, but something that was constructed after our own captured desires. Hauntology is something of a failed mourning:[47] our future has been stolen. The club of hypertechnological snobs has vindicated and even turned into marketing that failure which offers the “perfect camouflage.”[48] A legion of idiots offers the spectacle (para-warholian) of the nothing special, under the appearance of understanding absolutely nothing they make an attempt to hipsterise their life, showing across the total screen that there is no other way of contemporary being other than showing oneself as strictly bipolar. We have, literally, seen it all and with the universalisation of the Ludovico Treatment we can smile and declared that “we are healed,” though traces of spit still cover in our faces. We are passionately invested in the obscene and we share “experiences” in an ultra-digital reality show as (unconscious) collaborators on the global regime of surveillance and control.
Oscar Alonso Molina warned that the will for a Gesamtkunstwerk in the aesthetic of Santiago Talavera, both in his installations (as in that occasion when, compelled by an extreme passion, moved his studio into the gallery) as in his musical compositions. This artist keeps a constant rapport with music,[49] recognizing the influence of Philip Glass and especially that of Steve Reich and his composition Music for 18 Musicians. His pieces can be understood as modulations within the ambient or noise genre, being manifestations of a preoccupation on the concept of the ambiental.[50] The ecological consciousness of this artist[51] can be related to the concept of atmospheres as proposed by Gernot Böhme which brings Benjamin’s notion of the “aura” into other “spheres of presence.”[52] If man is absent perhaps it is perhaps a chance to think other forms of inhabiting the present, pulling the break on our devastating actions, learning to saunter, as in Tarkovsky’s film (as Santiago Talavera points out himself, this filmmaker is the one that has influenced him the most), about the zone where we are (still) forced to live.
We are living the “experience of the swarm,” oriented, without the need to make use of the subliminal, by the “bubble filter.” The contemporary anesthetising of our sensibilities, its systematic tearing apart, “is not only—we read in Now by the Invisible Committee—the result of survival in the bosom of capitalism, but its condition. We don’t suffer as individuals, we suffer in our attempt to be individuals.”[53] In the tsunami of big data what governs royally is the kingdom of lies.[54] Your computer screen, as noted by Eli Pariser, is increasingly less a kind of unidirectional mirror “that reflects your own interests, while algorithm analysts consider everything you click on.”[55] In the middle of a process of uberisation of the world, at a time when we have initiated the age of “molecular machinery,”[56] which brings about enormous emotional turmoils, our “culture of lack of attention” is one, almost always, of profound antipathy.[57] The hypertrophic stimulation and the simulation of pleasure breed obsessions if not a profound boredom at the heart of hyperexcitation.[58] We are exhausted about what Ernest Gellner has termed the “International of Disbelieving Consumers,” we have born the brunt of the austericide with those “bailouts” given to the banking industry, a testimony that the citizen has to always doomed to support the greed of Capital[59] and that our landscape is as desolate as those “sledges” or amusement park ruins which Santiago Talavera has shaped into timely allegories of what happens to our age.
In The World Without Us by Santiago Talavera, animals amble about our residues, like those pigs which stand right next to a “hull lost” plane turned into a strange “hut.” The catastrophic monologue of this artist seeks, desperately, company, though it knows that it’s extremely difficult to establish a fruitful dialogue. “The experience of the Other—writes Franco “Bifo” Berardi—is turned into something uncomfortable and rare, perhaps even painful, since it becomes part of an uninterrupted and frantic stimulus, and loses its singularity, intensity and beauty. The consequence is the reduction of curiosity and the increase of stress, aggressivity, anxiety and fear.”[60] A contradiction of the present has taken place between the degree of social bonds and an increase in the number of social interactions people have, which, with the help of the mass communication media, leads to a “saturated self.”[61] In the year 1903, Georg Simmel said in his meditations on metropolitan life that we are abandoning and finding so many new people, establishing networks of communication so vast that they make it impossible for us to relate to each other emotionally, let alone with all those belonging to our circle of acquaintances. While social networks offer a situational identity, we are also getting used to a state of “flexibilisation,” of provisionality, of precarisation. We are constantly throwing “self-promotion”[62] messages around and we are more sendentarised than subdued to hysteria, stretched out by a “corporeality” that seems to will-everything:[63] shut in the bubble of the (in)signifier.
We suffer-and-rejoice in the midsts of calls to indulge in an aesthetic excess which, at the same time, entails a “subjection” and construction of a neoliberal subjectivity.[64] In the age of digital “globalisation,” the physical and social proximities are kept increasingly more separate: those who stand socially close to us have no longer need to be physically close and vice versa. Once again we have to recollect the shakespearean dictum, “the time is out of joint,” and that we have to generate new processes of subjectivation.[65] Perhaps art has to direct its task towards those emotions or affects that we ignore.[66] Santiago Talavera, meanwhile, keeps his trust steadfastly on the power of imagination.[67] The Triebenergie (pulsional energy) that emerges “through” art can perhaps liberate us from the subordination that comes with the flourishing of information technologies and with automatised economy. Emotions or affects appear as a subjective or gestual embodiment that perhaps can intensify itself from a philosophy of “pure affirmation” which would come to posit once again the question of what can a body do.[68] In his Ethica more geometrico, Spinoza pointed out “that potency entails the power of being affected.” We have to, perhaps, do our best to “hurry slowly” in the incorporation of art, even if it is to give an account of the passage of things that pass. We need—much more than to know what we can—to activate our potentialities before the ultimate collapse takes place, putting an end or fracturing the “hypertitional invocation”[69] which can only doom us to the worst.
Beyond “funeral rhetoric” we must salvage the right to live.[70] Santiago Talavera doesn’t wallows in punk’s “no future” ethos, though he knows without a flicker of a doubt that all utopias have been dynamited. His attitude is that of learning from the destructive traces of man[71] and to keep on painting as if he were thinking-and-living in the katechon (the time before the end), in these “interesting times” of the Antropoceno or, even better, of its collapse. Santiago Talavera imagines, in a certain meaning, the wilderness (the world without us) and the dystopia where we have almost disappeared.[72] The interest for hauntology is, in the work of this artist, as much aesthetic as political, it entails a commitment not to allow hope to disappear or, at least, a commitment to keeping some images of the future, even if they are unsettling, drawing (meticulously like an intense experience of time) what has not fulfilled itself yet.[73]
Santiago Talavera rewrites Günther Anders’s phrase: “We are only apocalyptic in order to be wrong.” We have a duty to be pessimists or, at least, to avoid that deplorable complicity with the disaster that is termed happycracy. In his works the world is, literally, upside-down.[74] Spaces of entertainment are, to deploy a term dear to Dean MacCanell, “places of empty encounters,” Disneyland reveals its emblematically nihilist condition. Only the images survive on the stages without public, across empty stadiums, amusement parks where no one suffers from vertigo, at a time when catastrophe has already happened, placing us, apparently, in a present without future.[75]
Ivan López Munuera pointed out, in a conversation with Santiago Talavera, that it was curious to note, in some of his studio photographs, that a chair was standing in front of a half-finished work, to which the artist responded that the painting had swallowed him.[76] The “survivor” has secluded himself, perhaps to a hut to think, while at the top of columns we find no longer the prodigious Simon of the Column[77] but rather a goat which perhaps embodies a kind of mockery of our apocaliptic discourses. Even if, in agreement with Fredric Jameson, it seems that today it would be easier to imagine the total deterioration of the Earth and nature than the demise of capitalism, we have an ethic-and-aesthetic commitment to sketch utopias or, at least, to open up cracks in the system, with full awareness of the catastrophe of our collapsed present.[78] If in the works of Santiago Talavera we contemplate residual objects it is not only in order to seek a morbid-eschatological pleasure; on the contrary, it is a composition of an emerging reality,[79] in an attempt (this will sound ambientally utopian) to make the world better.[80]
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[1] Santiago Talavera interviewed by Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 128.
[2] “Among the key factors for the development of a new form of accelerationism that we find here there’s the collective-pharmaco-socio-sensorial-technologic adventure of rave culture and the simultaneous invasion of the home by mediatic technologies (VCRS, videogames, computers) and the popular interest in dystopian cyberpunk sci-fi which includes William Gibson’s Neuromancer trilogy and the films Terminator, Predator and Blade Runner (which have become key “texts” for these authors)” (Armen Avanessian and Mauro Reis: “Introducción” [“Introduction”] in Armen Avanessian and Mauro Reis (comp.): Aceleracionismo. Estrategias para una transición hacia el postcapitalismo [Accelerationism. Strategies for a transition towards postcapitalism], Ed. Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2017, p. 26).
[3] Hartmut Rosa: Alienación y aceleración. Hacia una teoría crítica de la temporalidad de la modernidad tardía [Alienation and Acceleration. Towards a Critical Theory of the Temporality of Late Modernity], Ed. Katz, Buenos Aires, 2016, p. 23.
[4] “The window was, of course, a media on its own, dependent on the apparition of the adequate technologies glass lamination. Windows are perhaps one of the most important inventions of visual culture, opening up architecture to new relations between the interior and the exterior, and reshaping the human body, by analogy, in interior and exterior spaces, so that the eyes appear are, as the trope goes, the windows of the soul. The ears are the porches and the mouth is bejeweled with pearled doors. From the lattice of Islamic ornamentation and the stained windows of Medieval Europe, passing through the picture-windows of shops, to the modern shopping mall and the flânerie of modernity, and the windows of Microsoft’s interface, the window is anything but a transparent entity, obvious and unmediated” (W.J.T. Mitchell: ¿Qué quieren las imágenes? [What do images want?], Ed. Sans Soleil, Vitoria, 2017, p. 271).
[5] “The new culture of hypercapitalism—noted Jeremy Rifkin in the year 2000—where everything in life consists in paying for experiences, which describes the purchase and sale of human experiences [in] theme cities, in the development based on shared interests, in centers dedicated to entertainment, in shopping malls, in global tourism, in fashion, cuisine, sports and professional games, films, television, virtual reality and [other] simulated experiences.” Rifkin warned that while the industrial era fed our physical being, the Age of Access feeds our mental, emotional and spiritual being: “While the control over the goods of exchange was what characterised the age that just concluded, the control over the exchange of concepts is what characterises the age to come. In the 21st century, institutions increasingly trade with ideas, and people, in their turn, buy increasingly more into those ideas and into the physical embodiments contained therein” (Jeremy Rifkin: La era del acceso. La revolución de la nueva economía [The Age of Access. The Revolution of the New Economy], Ed. Paidós, Barcelona, 2013, p. 48).
[6] “But, what is “our time”? The world of terrorism post 9/11 and the world belonging to incipient forms of neofascism, from the Taliban to the New American Empire? Is it the age of postmodernity or the age of a modernity (as argued by the philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour) that could have never existed? Is it a time defined by new media and new technology, an age of “biocybernetic reproducibility” which follows the age of “mechanical reproduction” of Walter Benjamin, the “world of cables” of Marshall McLuhan, a time that blurs the difference between machine and an organism? Is it this the moment when new objects in the world produce new philosophies such as that of objectivism and the old theories of vitalism and animism seem to be (like fossil formations) adopting new life?” (W.J.T. Mitchell: ¿Qué quieren las imágenes? [What do the images want?], Ed. Sans Soleil, Vitoria, 2017, p. 214).
[7] “Talavera is not a run-of-the-mill artist, he’s a plastic activist, a draughtsman of virtuosity, a master painter that we don’t know whether to classify as a new Renaissance painter or a “conceptual baroque artist.” Santiago is, to put it briefly, a visual philosopher, a plastic poet, a romantic…. A clear example of mestizaje between creation and social compromise through compositions along the lines to the great masters of the history of art. Santiago presents us with a new Garden of Earthly Delights where the viewers lose themselves and become the silent protagonists of his scenes” (Noemí Mendez: “11 tesis y más de 1001 motivos y el no cuestionamiento ante la obviedad” [11 thesis and more than 1001 motives and the Lack of Inquiries before What’s Obvious,” prologue to Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 10).
[8] Stephen Bertman has coined the term “culture of now” and “hasty culture” to refer to the lifestyles of our age and society, Cf. Hyperculture. The Human Cost of Speed, Ed. Praeger, London, 1998.
[9] “The Sea of Ice by David Friedrich influenced me a lot ever since I first saw it as a young kid. That boat sunk behind a heap of stones and ice is us—it’s our failure” (Santiago Talavera interviewed in Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 128).
[10] Santiago Talavera interviewed in Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 120.
[11] “It’s not only mere curiosity, nor is it iconographic bulimia; his way of looking at things in the world—and at the world itself—presents an aesthetics resembling the love for detail found in Gothic and Flemish painting, where every nook and cranny of the painting tried to capture the attention of the spectator with the same strength” (Santiago Talavera interviewed in Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 60.)
[12] Santiago Talavera interviewed by Iván Lópeza Munuera: “En este pequeño lugar hay una gran prueba” [“In this Small Place There is A Great Trial”] in Santiago Talavera. En la vida anterior [Santiago Talavera. In the previous life], Centre Municipal d’Elx, 2011, p. 20.
[13] Michel Maffesoli has analysed what he terms pointillist time in his book El instante eterno. El retorno de lo trágico en las sociedades posmodernas [The Eternal Instant. The Return of the Tragic in Postmodern Societies] (Ed. Paidós, Barcelona, 2001), a time which is defined by the proliferation of ruptures and discontinuities. “pointillist time is broken, or rather pulverized, into a multitude of “eternal instants” —events, incidents, accidents, adventures, episodes— monads shut into themselves, different bites, and each bite reduced to a point which approaches more and more its geometric ideal of un-dimensionality” (Zygmunt Bauman: Vida de consumo [Life of Consumption], Ed. Fondo de Cultura Económica, Madrid, 2016, p. 52).
[14] Ross Douthat: “The Great Consolidation” in New York Times, May 16 2010.
[15] Franco “Bifo Berardi: Fenomenología del fin. Sensibilidad y mutación conectiva [Phenomenology of the End. Sensibility and Connective Mutation], Ed. Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2017, p. 121.
[16] “Fukuyama himself warned that this radiant neoliberal city couldn’t last the threat of ghosts, though he was mostly thinking about nietzschean rather than marxist ghosts. Some of the most anticipatory pages of Nietzsche are those where he describes “the oversaturation of history to take place in a certain age,” which would lead it “to direct a dangerous irony towards itself,” as he wrote in Untimely Considerations, “and ultimately, most dangerous of all, toward cynicism.” Cynicism, that “cosmopolitan assignment,” which is nothing but an unattached form of spectacularism, replaces the space belonging to involvement and commitment. This is the condition of the Nietzsche’s Superior Man, he who has seen it all but is precisely weakened by this decadent excess of (self)consciousness” (Mark Fisher: Realismo Capitalista. ¿No hay alternativa? [Capitalist Realism. Is there no alternative?], Ed. Caja Negra, Madrid, 2016, p. 28).
[17] “The work of Santiago Talavera stimulates the clinical possibility of descrying, through impetuous clues, the rhetoric of overlapping layers which leaves us with that forgotten hole of the horror vacui” (Marcos Fernández: “Pasaba por aquí: notas sobre fragmentos, piezas que recoger y Santiago Talavera” [“I was just passing by: notes on fragments, pieces to pick up and Santiago Talavera”] in Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 16.)
[18] “When I began to use collage or papie collé I saw that the tactile dimension some drawings took affected in some way its reading; the commentaries and reactions to the images showed me how textures, glows or the thickness of papers and cardboards introduce synesthesia and play” (Santiago Talavera interviewed in Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 118).
[19] Santiago Talavera interviewed by Iván Lópeza Munuera: “En este pequeño lugar hay una gran prueba” [“In this Small Place There is A Great Trial”] in Santiago Talavera. En la vida anterior [Santiago Talavera. In the previous life], Centre Municipal d’Elx, 2011, p. 14.
[20] “The image couldn’t be enough in itself as an enclosed architecture shut in its own beauty. Precisely, the harmony of its transparent maze needed to be broken, running the risk (because there was, indeed, a physical need) of breaking everything” (George Didi-Huberman: Vislumbres [Glow], Ed. Shangrila, Santander, 2019, p. 265).
[21] “As before a fantastic set for kids, we feel a strange tension. What seems naive hides something dangerous, more uncanny as it is edulcorated” (Galería García: text in Santiago Talavera. La isla de los voraces [Santiago Talavera. The Island of the Voracious], Galería Soto, Madrid, 2009).
[22] Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 86.
[23] “The melancholic look of the painter back at those lost paradises requires drawing to give the spectator the possibility of looking back as well, back to those imaginary cemeteries where we go on throwing whatever we don’t want” (Carlos Rodríguez Gordo: “Reflexiones en torno a la obra de Santiago Talavera” [“Considerations on the oeuvre of Santiago Talavera”] in Santiago Talavera, La Lisa Arte Contemporáneo, Albacete, 2010).
[24] “There’s a kind of nostalgy for the future, for being at the same time in a past moment and in one still to come. In a way it’s a nostalgia for an imagined past time, but one which rings very close to home for me” (Santiago Talavera interviewed by Iván Lópeza Munuera: “En este pequeño lugar hay una gran prueba” [“In this Small Place There is A Great Trial”] in Santiago Talavera. En la vida anterior [Santiago Talavera. In the Previous Life], Centre Municipal d’Elx, 2011, p. 14.)
[25] Franco “Bifo” Berardi: Fenomenología del fin. Sensibilidad y mutación conectiva [Phenomenology of the End. Sensibility and Connective Mutation], Ed. Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2017, p. 325.
[26] “The 24/7 world constantly erodes any distinction between day and night, light and darkness, actions and rest. It’s a zone of insensibility, of amnesia, of that which destroys the possibility of experience. To paraphrase Maurice Blanchot, “as both belonging to the disaster as to the period after disaster, a world characterised by the empty sky, where no star or sign is visible, where one loses one’s way and one’s sense of direction.” It is, specifically, alike a state of emergency, when a conjunction of searchlights lit up suddenly at night, apparently as a response to some extreme circumstance, but actually in the permanent condition of never disconnecting or normalizing themselves” (Jonathan Crary: 24/7. El capitalismo al asalto del suelto [24/7. Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep], Ed. Ariel, Barcelona, 2015, p. 27).
[27] “It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Talavera uses frequently a canted perspectiva. The oblique or militar perspective offers a higher vantage point to the viewer, allowing him or her to hover over the stage. It is, obviously, the result of a kind of strained point of view, certainly, but also the effect of a kind of exhaustion….” (Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 40).
[28] Cf. Hito Steyerl: “En caída libre. Una experiencia mental sobre la perspectiva vertical” [“Free Fall. A Mental Experience about Vertical Perspective” in Los condenados de la pantalla [The Wretched of the Screen], Ed. Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2014, p. 15-32.
[29] Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 70.
[30] “To my mind the sublime exists, for instance, in Chernobyl, where, thirty years after the nuclear disaster, biodiversity is much more abundant and animals live in harmony without the need of human regulation” (Santiago Talavera interviewed in Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 128).
[31] “No gaze is objective, right? But my first intention is to think the world, to make a portrait in a moment when the relationship between man and nature is more and more reduced to the powers of a brand of capitalism that already announces its final chapters” (Santiago Talavera interview in Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 121). “The relationship between capitalism and eco-disaster is neither coincidence nor accident: the need for a “market in constant expansion” and its “fetish with growth” implies that capitalism is opposed to any notion of environmental sustainability” (Mark Fisher: Realismo Capitalista. ¿No hay alternativa? [Capitalist Realism. Is there no alternative?], Ed. Caja Negra, Madrid, 2016, p. 44).
[32] Ferrán Barenblit and Cuauhtémoc Medina: “La estética libre de la estética” [“Aesthetics Free From Aesthetics”] in Forensic Architecture. Hacia una estética investigativa, MACBA, Barcelona, 2017, p. 22.
[33] Eyal Weizman in conversation with Foster et. al. in: Forensic Architecture. Hacia una estética investigativa, MACBA, Barcelona, 2017, p. 38.
[34] “What’s happened to the work of Santiago is that it has acquired a catastrophic nature. The boundless accident, the implacable action of the forces of nature, the prodigious and saturnian technological media of our contemporary world, which once set in motion seem to be out of control…”(Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 92). I find certain connections between the aesthetics of Talavera and Paul Virilio’s reflections o accident: ““A characteristic, unique above all the rest, opposes contemporary civilization to those which have preceded it: speed. The metamorphosis took place in the lapse of a generation”: such observation was made around the 1930’s by the historian Marc Bloch. This circumstance determines, at the same time a secondary characteristic: the accident, progressive generalisation of catastrophic events which not only impacts our current reality, but that are also a source of anxiety and distress about future generations” (Paul Virilio: El accidente original [The Original Accident], Ed. Amorrortu, Buenos Aires, 2009, p. 13).
[35] “We are a plague and we are proud of the intellectual and technological refinement that we have achieved, while we continue on redesigning social power orders which nowadays still favour white supremacy, the oppression of women and homosexuals, and the daily exploitation of millions of animals for reasons that could be prevented such as traditional habits and conveniences” (Santiago Talavera interviewed in Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 131). “The idea that our species is a recent apparition upon our planet, that history such as we know it (farm-based, city-based, written-based) is even more recent, and that the industrial organisation of life, based on the intensive use of fossil fuels, began less than a second ago in the long count of Homo Sapiens’s evolution clock, and seems to be leading to the conclusion that humanity itself is a catastrophe [the italics are mine], a sudden and shattering event in the history of the planet, which will disappear much more rapidly than the changes it has brought into the thermodynamic cycle and the biological balance of the Earth” (Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: ¿Hay un mundo por venir? Ensayo sobre los miedos y los fines [Is There A World to Come? Essay on the Fears and the Ends], Ed. Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2019, p. 45).
[36] Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 84.
[37] Commenting upon the film Children of Men by Alfonso Cuarón, Mark Fished notes that “the disaster doesn’t have a punctual moment. The world doesn’t end with a bang: it rather goes on languidly extinguishing itself, dismembering itself gradually, sliding into a slow debacle” (Mark Fisher: Realismo Capitalista. ¿No hay alternativa? [Capitalist Realism. Is there no alternative?], Ed. Caja Negra, Madrid, 2016, p. 23).
[38] “Maybe there is no real outside for us. But we still have a place in the threshold of between inside and outside, between museum and its opposite, and only in that place, looking back to the world as presented and exhibited, and blinking before a nothing where everything is possible, can we recognize ourselves as inhabitants of a world that can’t be exhibited” (Peter Sloterdijk: El imperativo estético [The Aesthetic Imperative], Ed. Akal, Madrid, 2020, p. 329).
[39] As he commenting upon his fascination for a film such as Lost Highway by David Lynch, he adds: “For me it’s the same sensation that I experience when I look at at a junkyard, a place which goes on storing up those objects which have had their use, whichever it was, and find themselves now mixed up, their origin forgotten” (Santiago Talavera interviewed by Iván Lópeza Munuera: “En este pequeño lugar hay una gran prueba” [“In this Small Place There is A Great Trial”] in Santiago Talavera. En la vida anterior [Santiago Talavera. In the Previous Life], Centre Municipal d’Elx, 2011, p. 15).
[40] “In fact I would say that any landscape is a collective portrait, a great stage that changes at the same pace as our relationship with the world. In the process of Desde el vomitorio [From the Vomitorium], I understood that it was a mirror of our present and that the socio-historical consciousness, to which we all belong, was the principal driving force that pushing the work forward” (Santiago Talavera interviewed in Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 120).
[41] “We see rotting bodies, concrete, made of flesh and bone, where previously we used to bombastically discourse about the decomposition of the social order of a whole civilization or about its structural disarrangements; in the same way, the splendour of the woods, the growth of vegetation, the proliferating quality of wild nature, treated with our new technical media, becomes more convincing than ever, wrapping itself in a much more oppressive atmosphere” (Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 94).
[42] “There’s something in the environment which you can’t define. You begin to note a strange nervousness that grows little by little in the stomach. Something strange happens, something bad. Calmness remains, but there’s no longer peace. Suddenly terror prickles one’s senses. It dawns on you that perhaps you are in a narratively coherent dream, a thriller with uncannily abnormal elements, a bitter teenage nightmare capable of holding any kind of monster” (Ángel M. Alcalá: “El arte del confín del mundo” in Santiago Talavera, La Lisa Arte Contemporáneo, Albacete, 2010).
[43] “The drawings of Talavera come out in proportions beyond measurement, needing periods of time that have sometimes surpassed a year so as to be created in all their almost maniac detailness; they are beyond scope even before they are framed, they become true deposits of time and memory —both private and collective—, accumulating various private anecdotes from the artist himself and his surroundings” (Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 46).
[44] “In general, the work with which I feel the most uncomfortable with is that which gives me greater joys: my works on paper. Their composition is very uncomfortable, it’s a very cerebral task, very contained, it requires more hours of work, a slower process. There’s always the anxiety of seeing them finished. Entering the studio, seeing the piece after six months and still unfinished is always tough. Long periods end up collecting a lot of personal themes” (Santiago Talavera interviewed by Iván Lópeza Munuera: “En este pequeño lugar hay una gran prueba” [“In this Small Place There is A Great Trial”] in Santiago Talavera. En la vida anterior [Santiago Talavera. In the Previous Life], Centre Municipal d’Elx, 2011, p. 23).
[45] “Dystopies proliferate; and a certain perplexed panic (derogatively termed as “catastrophism”), when not a somewhat macabre enthusiasm (recently popularised under the name “accelerationism,” seems to ride the spirit of our times. Suddenly, the famous no future punk ethos has gained new life—if this is the term suitable to our times—, while profound questions arise, of a dimension comparable to those brought about by the nuclear arms race of the not so distant years of the Cold War. Thus, one can’t help but remember the somber and dry conclusion of Günther Anders, in a crucial text about the “metaphysical metamorphosis” of humanity after Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “The absence of future already began”” (Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: ¿Hay un mundo por venir? Ensayo sobre los miedos y los fines [Is There A World to Come? Essay on the fears and the Ends], Ed. Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2019, p. 26).
[46] Javier González Panizo: Escenografías del secreto. Ideología y estética en la escena contemporánea [Staging of the Secret. Ideology and Aesthetic of the Contemporary Scene], Ed. Manuscritos, Madrid, 2016, p. 234.
[47] “Hauntology can be constructed as a failed mourning. It’s about refusing to let the ghost go or —which is the same sometimes— the refusal of the ghost to abandon us. The spectre won’t allow us to get used to mediocre satisfactions that we can reap in a world governed by capitalist realism” (Mark Fisher: “La lenta cancelación del futuro” [“The Slow Cancellation of the Future”] in Los Fantasmas de mi vida. Escritos sobre depresión, hauntología y futuros perdidos [The Ghosts of my Life. Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures], Ed. Caja Negra, Madrid, 2018, p. 49).
[48] Cf. Andrew Keen: “Fracaso épico” [“Epic Fail”] in Internet no es la respuesta [Internet is not the answer], Ed. Catedral, Barcelona, 2016, p. 259-291.
[49] “I’ve always played in bands, I read the world through styles, songs, music histories, and that has crucially shaped my way of understanding the visual arts. Often when I work both in sketches or with drawings, toiling over their madness of layers upon layers, I think about that recorder [a multitrack recorder he was gifted when he was in school] and how I would go on adding and removing tracks until I managed to reach some harmony. It’s a similar process to that” (Santiago Talavera interviewed in Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 125).
[50] “In a painting—warns Santiago Talavera—there’s a moment when I begin to interest myself as much in the human figure as in what affects that figure. In that sense there’s a departure from the character so as to lay the focus on the background. That brings implicitly an interest on the ambiental, that’s where one finds the staging resembling that of David Lynch films, with those red drapes and black-and-white tiled floor, those strange sculptures that touch the spectator in such an emotional and brutal manner. There’s also an interest toward music without voice, ambient music, in an attempt to imagine the soundscape of the spaces these characters inhabit” (Santiago Talavera interviewed by Iván Lópeza Munuera: “En este pequeño lugar hay una gran prueba” [“In this Small Place There is A Great Trial”] in Santiago Talavera. En la vida anterior [Santiago Talavera. In the Previous Life], Centre Municipal d’Elx, 2011, p. 22).
[51] “That “impossibility toward nature” has stirred an increasing interest in the social problematics related to the world of ecology and animal rights, and perhaps that’s the reason that my artistic gaze is nowadays more tinged with a “environmental ethics,” as one can see in Clausura [Closure], where the crystal bell jar contains landscapes that seem to be broken” (Santiago Talavera interviewed in Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 137).
[52] Böhme defines atmospheres as spaces, in as much as the presence of things, people or the constellations that surround them, their “ecstasis”, “tinge” them: they are spheres of presence themselves, their reality in space. Atmospheres are inherent to the subject, “they belong to the subject in as much as they are experienced by people in their physical presence, and in as much as, at the same time, this experience is for the subject a physical encounter with space” (Gernot Böhme: Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1995, p. 33).
[53] The Invisible Committee: Ahora [Now], Ed. Pepitas de Calabaza, Logroño, 2017, p. 147.
[54] “The “lie” is right now an extramoral subject, and the lack of truth is the least of problems: also self-deceptions, illusions, strategies thanks to which people “imagine things as they are not”—they all belong to the age of big data, that is, the age of web interconnection between all data about people and things, to this category” (Frank Schirrmacher: Ego. Las trampas del juego capitalista [Ego. The Tricks of the Capitalist Game], Ed. Ariel, Barcelona, 2014, p. 160).
[55] Eli Pariser: El filtro burbuja. Cómo la red decide lo que leemos y lo que pensamos [The Purple Filter. How the Web Decides What We Read and What We Think], Ed. Taurus, Madrid, 2017, p. 13.
[56] “Nanocatalysm begins as science fiction. “Our skill to order atoms is the basis of technology,” notes Drexler, “though this has traditionally meant that we end up manipulating them like a tamed flock.” The precise engineering of atomic assembling would do away with rudimentary methods, beginning the age of molecular machinery, “the greatest technological leap of History.” Since neither logos nor history has the least chance of surviving said transition, this description is substantially deceptive” (Nick Land: “Colapso” [“Collapse”] in Armen Avanessian and Mauro Reis (comps.): Aceleracionismo. Estrategias para una transición hacia el postcapitalismo [Accelerationism. Strategies for a Transition toward Postcapitalism], Ed. Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2017, p. 56-57).
[57] “In the same way that there were “manners of cut” in the ages of monarchic regimes, there are forms and “manners of democracy” bred by the “communities of emotion” of fascism, nazism and its diverse variants. From this point of view, the contemporary age, whether we term it neocapitalist or spectacle society, seems to be characterised by what Claudine Haroche defines as a “culture of the lack of attention”: a culture where the old manners (moderation, composure or decorum, everything hat the 18th century called “self-government,” promoted by the bourgeoisie in opposition to the “effusions” and “torments” of the people) would be channeled and transformed by strategies of perception tied to the antipathy mentioned above. It’s a whole strategy of lack of interest which turns the mass of our fellow human beings into a mass of “insignificant individuals.” The crucial point of all these observations is that there is no contradiction in fact between the two phenomenon, which are, its insensitising, its location in a situation of indifference, its vocation toward generalized “antipathy”” (Georges Didi-Huberman: Pueblo en lágrimas, pueblos en armas [People in Tears, Peoples in Arms], Ed. Shangrila, Santander, 2017, p. 72-73).
[58] In 2015, PornHub, the pornographic website, was visited for more than 4392486580 hours, which is twice and a half the amount of time the Homo sapiens has inhabited the Earth.
[59] “It was made clearly evident, once again, that more than representing the end of capitalism, the bailouts of banks became the brutal guarantee of typical insistence of capitalist realism, that is: that there is no alternative” (Mark Fisher: Realismo Capitalista ¿No hay alternativa? [Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative?], Ed. Caja Negra, Madrid, 2016, p. 117).
[60] Franco “Bifo” Berardi: Fenomenología del fin. Sensibilidad y mutación conectiva [Phenomenology of the End. Sensibility and Connective Mutation], Ed. Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2017, p. 204.
[61] “New technologies—notes Kenneth Gergen in El yo saturado [The Saturated Self] (Ed. Paidós, Barcelona, 2006)—make it possible to have relationships—directly or indirectly—with a wider arch of people. In various aspects we are reaching what can be seen as a social saturation. The magnitudes of those changes are rarely self-contained. They keep a power of reverberation through culture, they accumulate PAUSADAMENTE till one day we find ourselves blocked, giving an account of when we have been dislocated, without being able of recovering what we’ve lost […]. With the intensified saturation of culture, however, all our previous assumption about identity are at bay and our traditional patterns of relationships become even stranger. A new culture is in the making.”
[62] “Facebook in itself takes the form under which it calls for people to throw their little self-promoting messages to the wind, before an imagined public standing in rapt attention, where the passing opportunities of genuine exchange of ideas seem to shut up in an instant” (Martha Rosler: “Al servicio de la(s) experiencia(s)” [“At the service of experiences] in Clase cultural. Arte y gentrificación [Cultural Class. Art and Gentrification], Ed. Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2017, p. 189).
[63] In the Freudian Studies on Hysteria there are references to the “active or stenian affects,” an expression coined to refer to the surprising potencies (in relation to the old question about “What a body can do?”) characteristic of hysteric mobility. “The “active,” or “stenian” affects compensate the access of [psychic] excitation with a mobile discharge. The screams and leaps of joy, the added muscular tone of rage, the vociferations, retaliation, allow for the excitation to discharge itself through certain movements. Moral suffering releases itself from excitation through the breathing efforts and secretions: sobbing and tears. We can confirm everyday that these reactions tend to reduce themselves and pacify excitation” (Gilles Deleuze: Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation [Francis Bacon. Logic of Sensation], Ed de la Différence, Paris, 1981, p 43).
[64] “In a climate such as this there’s nothing more precious than excess. The further you go, the more materials you’ll come across to accumulate and capitalise upon. Everything is organised in relation to limits, intensities, modulations. As Robin James said, “for the neoliberal subject, the aim of life is “to go to the edge,” coming closer and closer to the point of decreasing efficiency […]. The neoliberal subject has a boundless appetite for more and more new differencies.” The aim is to reach “the limits of exhaustion”: to follow a line of intensification and, notwithstanding, to be capable of abandoning that frontier, treating it as an inversion and recuperating the intensity as gain. As James stated, “privileged people live the most intense lives, lives of inversion (individual and social) and max benefits.” This is why transgression doesn’t work anymore as a subversive aesthetic strategy. Or rather, transgression works too well as a strategy for the accumulation both of “cultural capital” as well as capital tout court” (Steven Shaviro: “Estética aceleracionista: ineficiencia necesaria en tiempos de subsunción real” [“Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in times of Real Subsumption”] in Aremn Avanessian and Mauro Reis (ed.): Aceleracionismo. Estrategias para una transición al postcapitalismo [Accelerationism. Strategies for a Transition Toward Postcapitalism], Ed. Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2017, p. 175).
[65] “The time is out-of-joint,” wrote Gregory Bateson, quoting Hamlet. Out-of-joint, dislocated. The increasing connectivity and the subjection of our cognitive activities to the management of digital machines has brought about a disadjustment between the mutated rhythm of the connected mind and the rhythm of the corporeal mind. As a consequence, the general intellect has separated itself from the body. The problem here is not the subject as a static and given reality. The problem is subjectivation, the process whereby consciousness and self-reflection emerges, without considering it in an isolated manner, but rather in the context of its technological environment and its social conflicts. The subjectivation must be also understood as morphogenesis, as the creation of forms” (Franco “Bifo” Berardi: Fenomenología del fin. Sensibilidad y mutación conectiva [Phenomenology of the End. Sensibility and Connective Mutation], Ed. Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2017, p. 251).
[66] It isn’t incidental that the epigraph of Vygotski for his Psychology of Art belonged to a great text by Spinoza on emotions, which asked the question, “what can a body do,” precisely because “no one today has determined it” (Lev Vygotski: Psychologie de l’art, Ed. La Dispute, Paris, 2005, p. 13).
[67] “What led me to keep on talking about landscape is its oneiric component, its direct ties to the imagination. William Blake, for whom this subject was of the first importance, wrote: “to green-eyed imagination nature is imagination itself” (Santiago Talavera interviewed in Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 119).
[68] “Now, this fundamental “affirmation” is certainly destined to appear as gestures in the expression. Thus the question posited by Deleuze on the chapters of the Ethics dedicated to the effects of emotions: “What can a body do?” A way of saying that the expression is potent because it’s active, as long as the sequence is constructed to make us move from suffering to imagining (the “image is the idea of affection,” summarizes Deleuze, even if it makes us “only think the object by its affect”), from imagining to thinking (following the game of “common notions” and the “free harmony of the imagination with the reason”), and, finally, from thinking to acting; that’s what Deleuze terms the “active-becoming” which is intrinsic to all expression” (Georges Didi-Huberman: Pueblos en lágrimas, pueblos en armas, Ed. Shangrila, Santander, 2017, p. 37).
[69] “Hypertition [writes Nick Land] is a circuit of positive feedback that includes culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno)-science of self-fulfilling prophecies (“Hypertition. An Introduction” in merliquify.com).
[70] “Even in the mouths of those suspect of being the undertakers of the the whole future, even there remains a symbol of the most fundamental human right, the symbol of the right to life, in a present bearable because such present can still have hopes that, with regards to the future, there is no reason to lose all hope” (Peter Sloterdijk: El imperativo estético [The Aesthetic Imperative], Ed. Akal, Madrid, 2020, p. 376).
[71] “It’s all been an excuse to speak about ourselves through our trace. Bonaventura Puig and Perucho used to say: “… there’s hardly any truly primeval landscape but as backdrop for human action,” and in my works it can be understood in the same manner, it could even serve as an example to understand that landscape as an aesthetic element doesn’t exist without the human animal” (Santiago Talavera interviewed in Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 132).
[72] This is something that has been discussed by Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Bibeiros de Castro in ¿Hay un mundo por venir? Ensayo sobre los miedos y los fines [Is There A World to Come? Essay on the Fears and the Ends] (Ed. Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2019, p. 57-63), a book that, as Santiago Talavera confesses, has influenced him greatly.
[73] “What should overtake us is not the no more of social-democracy as it existed, but the not yet of that popular modernism prepared us to wait for but which never materialized themselves. Those specters—the specters of lost futures—question the formal nostalgia of the world of capitalist realism (Mark Fisher: “La lenta cancelación del futuro” [“The Slow Cancellation of the Future”] in Los fantasmas de mi vida. Escritos sobre depresión, hauntología y futuros perdidos [The Ghosts of My Life. Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures], Ed. Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2018, p. 55).
[74] “In the paintings and drawings of Santiago Talavera our world appears represented upside-down. Reason hasn’t been able to support as much as it constructed and now it’s only capable of showing its absolute failure. There’s nobody left, only the trace that remains after the perfect catastrophe, which can show us the structures, the ruined intentions, the impossibility of what could have been the paradise that the old rational plans wanted to erect” (Rafael Doctor: “Las aperturas que se vienen” [“The incoming Openings”] in Santiago Talavera. En la vida anterior [Santiago Talavera. In the Previous Life], Centre Municipal d’Elx, 2011, p. 9).
[75] “The revolution already happened… the events which we have to deal with are not in the future but to a large extent in the past […] whatever we do, the threat will remain with us for centuries or millennia” (Bruno Latour: Face à Gaïa. Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique [Facing Gaia. Eight Conferences about the New Climatic Regime], Paris, La Découverte, 2015).
[76] “The painting has swallowed me up. I love this photograph by Ilya Kabakov which shows an empty chair in front of an enormous drawing that is also empty, as if it had swallowed it” (Santiago Talavera interviewed by Iván Lópeza Munuera: “En este pequeño lugar hay una gran prueba” [“In this Small Place There is A Great Trial”] in Santiago Talavera. En la vida anterior [Santiago Talavera. In the Previous Life], Centre Municipal d’Elx, 2011, p. 20).
[77] “Simeon the Stylite (son of a shepherd, Syria and Cilicia: South-East of Anatolia: 390-459). Furor of ascesis by self-interrogation: he buries himself in a garden, in a hole up to his head, the summer long: forty days in a cave without light (the monastery tries to get rid of him). He immures himself, cements his door: forty days without nourishment. In 423, near Antioch he installs himself on a pillar [stylos: the column], first somewhat low, increasingly elevated; in 430: forty elbows (=twenty meters). He builds himself a balustrade (and instigates the emperor against the Jews). It’s a kind of sportive performance of ascesis: a proof of reclusion like a jump with a vaulting pole. Institution of cenobitism: limiting such excesses, by way of the benedictine virtue par excellence: the discretio. Cf. Dostoievski, in Devils, speaks of Elisabeth, mad for Christ: has been living in a kind of cage for the last 16 years, without talking to anyone, neither cleaning herself nor combing her hair (Roland Barthes: Cómo vivir juntos. Notas de Cursos y Seminarios en el College de France, 1976-1977 [How to Live Together. Notes for Courses and Seminars at the College de France, 1976-1977], Ed. Siglo XXI, Buenos Aires, 2003, p. 110-11).
[78] “The long and black night of the end of History must be taken as a superb chance. The oppressive generality of capitalist realism means that even the most untenable political and economic alternatives store immense potential. The most subtle of events is capable of opening an enormous hole in the grey and reactionary curtain that has covered the horizon of possibilities beyond capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing could ever change, everything appears as possible once again” (Mark Fisher: Realismo capitalista. ¿No Hay alternativa?, Ed. Caja Negra, Madrid, 2016, p. 120-121).
[79] Fredric Jameson, in his text “The Utopia as Replication” (included in Valencias de la dialéctica [Valences of Dialectics], Ed. Eterna Cadencia, Buenos Aires, 2013), picks up again on the distinction made by Raymond Williams between emergence and residual: “the forms of an utopian future threatened across the fog, an utopian future that we must grappled with like an opportunity to exercise fully our utopian imagination, rather than a chance to make moralizing judgements or to practise a regressive style of nostalgia.”
[80] “As always I want to channel the powers at war, as always, to make things better. If it isn’t to make the world better, art would be of no use” (Santiago Talavera interviewed in Óscar Alonso Molina: Santiago Talavera, Ed. Nocapaper Books, Santander, 2016, p. 137).
Details: The minuscule warns (itself)
The Poetics of Santiago Talavera in eleven theses.
But how can these scenarios raised by Talavera, so confusing and complex, so forced and difficult, avoid verbosity or simply the absurd, the disastrous and a deafening finale? How do they manage not to become a platform for unceasing and mere chance encounters between the dissimilar and the multiple, things abandoned in the margins of the world of production, the overabundance of genres, objects, things and parts of things? His images are a true grinder/blender where both the new and the old are recycled to compose scenarios of dislocated utopias that start from our happy and ignorant reality as the First World. This curious pantheism that includes – or rather implies, with infinite patience, possibly not exempt from piety – the whole arch of goods and waste, provides them with a new opportunity not so much in their new and original combinations as in the possibility to be looked at again with care.
Looking at the world in detail is exactly what we see Santiago doing. It is not just curiosity or iconographic bulimia; what his way of looking at things in the world – and at the world itself – postulates, is close to that love for detail in Gothic and Flemish painting, where each point on the picture aimed at catching the viewer’s attention with the same force. The little flower in a corner is no less important, in detail and attention, than the eyes of Jesus that take up the geometric centre of the same picture; in the same way as the birds gliding on the horizon, hardly visible if you, dear reader, take a few steps back from the surface painted over five centuries ago now, are dealt with in the same delicacy as the bound hands or drops of blood sliding down the face of the Ecce Homo. This is complete holism, which five centuries later abstractly conquered all over painting.
“Behold the man”…, yes, except for the fact that the man is not there, as I will explain below. Mankind is present in absentia: in his belongings, in his tireless capacity to produce and fill the world with liveable spaces, thingu- majigs, the way he takes up the landscape or colonizes virgin territories … Santiago Talavera’s work is concerned with all of this, he deals with the little accidents that happen along the way just as a notary would, the same as the huge amount of traces we leave behind us while we achieve things. And he does so with a blend of delicacy in the pictorial or drawing treatment, and an implacable, unbribeable and critical lucidity in the moral treatment, coming close in his combination to what his admired Bosco and Brueghel attained. He seems to have learnt precisely from old masters like these the value of the close gaze over the vast extension of the visible world – the macro and the micro[1] – which leads him to touch individualized things in their moral essence, to the extent that he composes his work based on the meticulous tissue of a myriad of minute details that grab the attention of the eye – warnings!
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[1] “Observe the form well, both the small one and the large one; but separate the paltry from the whole”, is one of Caspar David Friedrich’s famous maxims.
Óscar Alonso Molina, 2015
Copyright: Publisher NOCAPAPER BOOKS & MORE
Santiago Talavera
Text for “One Project”, ArtMadrid 2015. Carlos Delgado Mayordomo
To paint like a draftsman and draw like a painter. Through this certainty, stated by Santiago Talavera in various writings and interviews, we can begin to understand the complex process of a work that comprehends the construction of the image from a refined presentation of form. Density and lightness, analysis and precision as strategies to thematize the strangeness of a futurible universe, where geographical and temporal concreteness has been abolished to construct a new map whose main narrative is the tension between man and nature.
Against the belief of the Rousseauian ideal that maintains the conviction that man is good by nature and that only civilization corrupts him, Santiago Talavera emphasizes what it means to inhabit a reality created by man and based on the hegemony of rationalism. Between the essential fixity of being and the changing becoming of the sensible, geometry emerges as a strategy to rationalize the abstract vision of nature, space, and its forms. In Santiago Talavera’s drawings, this artificial and measurable resource appears as a ruin abandoned in the middle of the path. These imposing dodecahedrons lie next to dead animals, an association that leads us, firstly, to reflect on the impact of civilization on nature and the unknowns that the future holds regarding the coexistence between people and animals. But both elements, nature and geometry, share the same status of vulnerability as they are configured as traces of the same “crime scene.”
Drawing, as Gombrich has pointed out, resembles reality, although reality never resembles drawing. And it is from the awareness of this autonomy that Santiago Talavera assumes a suggestive play of scales, displacements, and narrative inventions. This happens in the monumental work “Anthropocosmos,” whose starting point is a photograph the artist took of an ancient amphitheater and whose result is an absolutely enigmatic image where the real figures invention and vice versa. In some way, the artist constructs with all realism that which is hidden but flows like a constant rumor in our becoming. An uninhabited, abysmal, idyllic, and disturbing space at the same time, and one that responds to a perfectly delineated plan by the artist. The strategy that organizes the drawing, the meticulous planning that goes from the selection of paper to the search for those chromatic tones that give a strange carnality to the form, all obeys the firm desire to bring forth the image of an unlived time. In this sense, Santiago Talavera consolidates with each exhibition as one of the most fascinating, powerful, and subtle creators of his generation.
Carlos Delgado Mayordomo. One Project. Art Madrid, 2015
Santiago Talavera en 2014/ antes de irse. 40 ideas sobre pintura
Book “2014/ antes de irse. 40 ideas sobre pintura”. David Barro, Dardo Editions
Santiago Talavera’s work is an insistent painting that is born out of a minimal argument, decomposing small everyday events until forming a chaotic, absurd and enigmatic surrounding. The fantastic and the critical form a place of conflict, although this is delicate, with some pastel chromatic ranges and a delicate approach befitting an undeniable pictorial virtuosity. Everything in his painting is abysmal and over-saturated. Objects, figures and situations form stories in which accumulation comes together in a nostalgic and unusual present, as if the future was found in the past. Deep down, what is revealed is the post-modern condition of disintegration of referents and the loss of organic time, like in that impossibility of history felt by the characters in Blade Runner. In the case of Santiago Talavera it is an absence that takes on the form of a catastrophe when in works like From the vomitorium, the human disappears and there is only the remains of the shipwrecking. As pointed out by Rafael Doctor, “whether it is a landscape, an interior or an event, everything is told in a same absorbed and contained moment from which, as human beings, we are excluded”. In Santiago Talavera’s works time is not representable, and the games of scale do not allow us to move within this outsize state, where everything overflows and the spectator has access to the image until entering it, like that scene in which Deckard, in Blade Runner, uses a machine to get into a photograph, making this view a three-dimensional experience. Santiago Talavera has stated his attraction for this idea in which the small may hide the greater proof and actually literally translates this by moving his studio to the New Gallery space for his last exhibition.
Without doubt, one of Santiago Talavera’s greatest achievements is that of mantaining a certain distance in relation to landscape. While being a miniaturist, he adds objects and colours until he generates a new, unique, psychological and enigmatic, reflective and absurd atmosphere. The cryptic aspect of his titles, taken fron songs or films, also do not lead towards a concrete meaning, albeit doing so by opening up ideas for research. Because it is a matter of imagining, as the artist beforehand thinks of speaking of great things on a small scale. A universe that is seen and is controlled, or, if we follow Baudrillard, a series of fragments of a hologram in which each splinter contains the whole universe. So each thought becomes a fragmented story, although with different words and colours. We are talking of an infinite repetition, about a continued nightmare in which each chapter shows us the whole, with stagings for us to reflect about man, his achievements and disgraces. Like in classic artists like El Bosco, the details reinforce the subject, granting space to different metaphors and possibilities for capturing and presenting the condition and destiny of humanity.
It is a matter of granting poetry to the rest, the catastrophic. Sometimes through drawing and other times through the density of the painting. Santiago Talavera himself says that he enjoys painting as a draughtsman and drawing as a painter. In both cases the process is slow and dull, leading to the paradox that a painting may be a sketch for a drawing and not the contrary. In any case, the clarity of the result and the lack of human figures show the effect of a faltification, detracting from the narrative logics to produce a world in which the idyllic and the tragic call up the accidental, that which is about to suddenly take place but we never see, just like in the strange and disturbing atmospheres shown by David Lynch, a sort of Apocalypse without Apocalypse. Indeed, Santiago Talavera’s works take on the same sensation that Claudio Magris describes when passing through Central Europe at The Danube: a possible boisterous future of survivors of some catastrophe.
David Barro
En ese pequeño lugar hay una gran prueba
Entrevista con Santiago Talavera. Por Iván López Munuera.
En las obras de Santiago Talavera (Albacete, 1979) siempre hay un gusto por la abundancia de objetos, figuras, situaciones y atmósferas que pueden recordar al síndrome de Diógenes, ese desorden del comportamiento en el que sus afectados se distinguen por la acumulación compulsiva de objetos en sus domicilios. Espacios rebosantes que traspasan la cualidad visual de sus imágenes para extenderse hacia atmósferas que sugieren una ordenación temporal diferente. Lugares marcados por la asincronía o, más bien, por la simultaneidad de categorías cronológicas resumidas mediante una sola imagen, caótica y porosa, inestable y envolvente. Todo al mismo tiempo en un mismo lugar. Indirectamente, las viviendas y la situación de los aquejados por este trastorno quiebran el régimen temporal hegemónico en occidente, cimentado -como ya apuntara George Kubler en 1962[1]– en el tiempo biológico (que marca nuestra trayectoria vital) y en el cronológico (establecido a partir del paso de las agujas del reloj[2]), para dar lugar a multitud de perspectivas, todas factibles y válidas, aunque imposibles de fijar. Este aspecto de sus obras se percibe también en su estudio, un antiguo garaje compartido con otros artistas, donde diferentes piezas, terminadas o en curso, se mezclan con reproducciones de otras que le interesan, novelas que lee o relee, ensayos, músicas ambientales, fotografías de distintos medios de comunicación e instrumentos de trabajo. Hablar de estas atmósferas es un buen punto de partida para una entrevista sobre su producción.
Hay un aspecto que me resulta muy sugerente y muy llamativo en muchas de tus obras, y es el despliegue en un paisaje de cierta simultaneidad de situaciones e imágenes que parecen fogonazos de distintos momentos y lugares reunidos en un mismo escenario. Obras como “Desde el vomitorio” (2011), “Core” (2009), “La isla de los voraces” (2008) o “Dónde vivir y para qué” (2010) ilustran un mundo estratificado, sin jerarquías cronológicas o de situación que apuntan a una atmósfera un tanto enloquecida, un tanto ensoñadora en la que ciertas convenciones, como las geográficas o las temporales han sido abolidas. ¿Podrías hablarme de estas consideraciones?
El enfoque de estas obras, aunque suene muy ingenuo, no parte de ninguna idea preestablecida. El resultado es algo bastante orgánico. Surge de una multiplicidad de reflexiones y de una voluntad de añadir de manera continua. Vivimos en un mundo de replicas de replicas, en un contexto multirreferencial y vertiginoso que tiende a la acumulación. Creo que esta visión la produce una incertidumbre extraída de preguntas muy básicas: qué hay después de esto, más bien, que hay detrás de estas imágenes y de esa sobreproducción. Y estas cuestiones las replanteo desde un enfoque estético. Esa simultaneidad que comentas me interesa mucho y siempre la percibo al ver cómo avanza la obra. Sobre todo al ver las piezas terminadas. Hay una especie de nostalgia de futuro, de estar al mismo tiempo en un momento pasado y en uno por venir. De algún modo es una nostalgia de un tiempo pasado imaginado, pero que para mí es muy cercano.
Melancólico tal vez, es decir, melancolía definida como nostalgia de un tiempo no vivido, deseado o desafiante.
Sí. Me doy cuenta de que esa visión nostálgica está en mí a través de imágenes del futuro, de escenarios de ciencia ficción que me son tan cercanos como cualquier otra realidad. Son también intereses muy vagos en cuestiones de física cuántica, en preceptos o creencias de que podamos estar en varios sitios a la vez en un mismo momento. Eso es algo que me fascina.
Es una visión muy cinematográfica, sobre todo de ciertas películas de David Lynch, un autor que te interesa especialmente. Me refiero a films como “Carretera perdida” (Lost Highway, 1997) donde el presente y el futuro se mezclan de manera continua, aturdiendo a unos personajes que acaban por invocar ciertas situaciones (incluidas las más extremas, como el asesinatos) al estar sumergidos en un estado de confusión casi narcótico.
Desde luego. Para mí es la misma sensación que la de contemplar un vertedero, un lugar donde se van quedando los restos de los restos, objetos que han tenido un uso, el que sea, y que quedan de repente mezclados, olvidando su origen. O como mirar todo desde un retrovisor, vas en el coche y miras todo lo que ha quedado atrás. La sensación es de una gran velocidad. Todo se va sucediendo: películas, fotografías de películas, lecturas sobre películas… sensaciones contrapuestas que se van almacenando y van pasando.
Por seguir con las referencias cinematográficas y con otra de tus obsesiones, Andrei Tarkovsky, elaboras una serie de ficciones muy ligadas al contexto que las rodea, al mundo que las envuelve, donde no se sabe muy bien cuál es el argumento, pero donde parece que ha ocurrido algo o que algo está a punto de pasar y que, por decirlo de una manera un poco directa, nos lo hemos perdido. Es decir, que algo terrible ha podido suceder y sin embargo la cámara se detiene en cierto goce estético, como si ciertos escenarios en apariencia idílicos pudiesen invocar las acciones más dramáticas, algo que se ve en la sucesión de imágenes, de fotogramas, que componen “La vida anterior” (2011).
Exacto. A mí me gusta mucho trabajar de una manera no consciente con las barbaridades bonitas, como en el “Tsunami rosa” (2006), por ejemplo. Podría parecer perverso por la situación, un momento de muerte y destrucción avanza hacia una población. Pero es tan hermoso… una enorme ola teñida de rosa. Es una imagen bestial que vemos de manera continua en los medios de comunicación, impactos que nos repelen pero que son tan atractivos al mismo tiempo. Nosotros mismos vamos buscando esas escenas. Más que una intención por buscar lo sórdido diría que es algo inevitable. Algo que lleva a sospechar sobre la imagen. Y esto tiene que ver con el paisaje en sí. Me obsesiona esa frase de Óscar Wilde de que la vida imita al arte más que el arte a la vida. Desde esa percepción nos damos cuenta de que el impacto que tiene el arte sobre la concepción de lo natural o del medio en el que nos movemos es tan fuerte que nos resulta imposible pensar en una mirada neutra, aséptica, sin contenidos previos.
Es decir, que no hay un ahí fuera que es contemplado u observado, sino que está conectado con otras visiones y percepciones más elaboradas. Algo que se encuentra en lecturas que citas como las de Thoreau y su visión de la naturaleza o en Hiroshige y sus construcciones del paisaje.
En todo paisaje hay un distanciamiento, hay una sospecha, te mojas, imaginas. Todo paisajista es una persona que no deja de mirar desde una ventana y esa posición es muy sospechosa. ¿Hacia dónde mira y desde dónde? Es un trabajo complejo construido por múltiples factores.
¿Y cómo abordas esas construcciones de subjetividad?
Mi enfoque es muy plástico y muy de experimentar, de prueba y ensayo. Tomo lo natural como un inmenso campo de pruebas. Por ejemplo, lo que comentabas antes de Hiroshige, alguien que me fascina, me resulta muy sugerente. Pienso en las 36 visiones que hace del Monte Fuji y cómo consigue iconizar tanto un elemento del paisaje, una montaña, que se convierte de pronto en algo casi comestible. Ese juego con las formas y los colores para llegar a generar otras cosas dentro de un paisaje me obsesiona. Ahí entra de nuevo la voracidad y lo comestible. Hay una voluntad de aprehender algo tan inmenso como la naturaleza para convertirlo en algo bidimensional y para reelaborar todos sus elementos en un concepto lo más plástico posible. Esa ansiedad de añadir objetos, de pegarlos, de ver sus diferentes posibilidades y convertirlos en cúmulos que no tienen nada que ver entre sí… tengo esa necesidad de reelaborar, tengo que verlo.
En este juego participan de una manera fundamental los títulos que escoges: evocadores, crípticos, insinuantes. Hemos hablado de algunos ellos pero habría más, como “Del sentimiento de no estar del todo” (2010), “Ceremonia disimulada” (2008) o “La guarida de los amos ocultos III” (2009). ¿Cómo surgen estos títulos?
Suelo escogerlos de la misma manera voraz en la que aparecen las diferentes partes en la obra: de manera acumulativa, hasta un momento en que dejo la pieza, la abandono y decido el nombre. Suelen ser caprichosos: letras de canciones, títulos de libros, diálogos de películas, relaciones continuas que me atrapan. Procuro que sea algo que produzca un caleidoscopio de lecturas. No pretendo que sean analíticos ni determinantes, pero sí influyentes, significativos. Que el título aporte pero no fije su significado. Voy haciendo un listado de muchos títulos y los voy eliminando.
En tus obras hay cambios de escalas continuos y simultáneos: de una zapatilla a un estadio de fútbol, de una flor que acoge a una ciudad a un tsunami. Escalas que también aplicas a los formatos, con una diferencia muy evidente entre obras muy grandes y muy pequeñas que acogen implicaciones muy diversas.
Para los tamaños grandes pienso en el espectador viviendo dentro, dejando flotar su mirada en el interior. Si encontrase papeles de tamaño inmenso, los haría todavía más grandes. Por el contrario, el formato pequeño me gusta por algo diferente aunque muy ligado a lo anterior. Quiero que el espectador se introduzca en la obra, sí, pero tratando de generar una vida alrededor de lo pequeño. Por eso me aburre tanto exponer en ciertas galerías o museos, porque el espacio expositivo marca de una manera un poco desagradable la percepción de la pieza. Prefiero otros espacios.
¿Podrías explicarte mejor?
Yo tengo una imagen, un deseo que no he logrado hacer y es poder trasladar todo el estudio a otro lugar porque me interesa el taller como paisaje en sí mismo. Creo que hay una especie de caldo donde se generan muchas serendipias, muchos encuentros con el propio material que son muy reveladoras para la obra. Los “cubos blancos” aseptizan la obra demasiado y por eso me gustaría elaborar obras que las desvinculen de ese tipo de espacios. A veces he hecho lienzos de 4 por 8 centímetros con la intención de focalizar la mirada de una manera radical, para que te sientas obligado a acercarte mucho a la pared y que te olvides un poco de todo lo demás.
Al mismo tiempo, la manera de abordar unos y otros es diferente en su contenido. En las obras grandes hay una atención al detalle, a lo pequeño, con una actitud muy minuciosa. Sin embargo, en los pequeños sucede lo contrario. Parece un hiperzoom que convierte cualquier superficie en un motivo decorativo, en un pattern que agita todo el contenido
De nuevo vuelvo al tema de la sospecha. Desde pequeño me fascinó esa imagen de “Blade Runner” (Ridley Scott, 1982) en la que el detective Deckard utiliza una máquina para entrar dentro de una fotografía, reelabora la bidimensionalidad de la imagen en un espacio tridimensional para moverse a derecha e izquierda. Está dentro de la habitación y, por fin, descubre una prueba fundamental. Me encantaría poder hacer eso. Esa sensación de que en ciertas imágenes se esconden detalles determinantes y que no podemos verlos porque están detrás de algo, me excita. Algo se esconde ahí. En ese pequeño lugar hay una gran prueba.
Hablando de pruebas y de la importancia del estudio en la vinculación con tu obra, me resulta curioso que, con frecuencia, hagas fotografías de tu estudio con la silla delante de una obra a medio terminar, con todo preparado y donde parece que está todo excepto alguien: tú mismo.
Sí. El cuadro me ha tragado. Me gusta mucho una fotografía de Ilya Kabakov en la que aparece una silla vacía delante de un dibujo enorme, también vacío, que parece que se lo ha comido.
Estás ensayando también procesos inversos: en vez del cuadro absorbiéndote, haces que sea éste el que se desparrame por la habitación. Es decir, tienes varios bocetos de instalaciones que complementan tus piezas con montañas de papel, por ejemplo, avanzando desde el cuadro por el espacio.
A muchos creadores que trabajamos con la bidimensionalidad nos ocurre, inevitablemente, que fabulamos con expandir nuestro mundo por el espacio. En muchos de mis escenarios creativos hay algo excesivo, una necesidad de sacarlos hacia fuera, de pretender que el espectador pueda recorrer una obra, que pueda estar ahí, en ellos. Me interesa mucho que el espectador pueda vivir dentro. Forzosamente los lugares salen hacia fuera en la imaginación.
De alguna manera ya lo haces al fabricar una atmósfera envolvente con la música que tú mismo compones para algunas obras o al margen de ellas.
Sí, de hecho, en esta última exposición mi idea es que “Desde el vomitorio” (2011) contenga un micrófono que está grabando la banda sonora de esa pieza. Imagino cómo pueden sonar esos lugares habitualmente inhabitados. En ellos no suele haber gente, sólo hay restos, pero querría saber qué comen los que allí viven, qué tipo de arte compran los que lo ocupan, qué sonidos emiten las personas o los objetos que la pueblan.
Algo muy ligado a las arquitecturas que representas: estadios vacíos, grandes construcciones decimonónicas desiertas, poblados engullidos.
Me gusta mucho pervertir o transformar el uso, sobre todo humano, de esos lugares, de esas arquitecturas. En una obra de 2009, “Las buenas noticias se dicen en voz baja” convierto un pueblo de montaña en algo miniaturizado, casi como unas casitas de chocolate, sobre las que estallan fuegos artificiales. Algo maravilloso está sucediendo mientras duermen. O algo en apariencia asombroso no despierta el interés de los demás, algo que ocurre justo encima de sus cabezas. Por el contrario, en “Desde el vomitorio” quería ver qué pasaba con construcciones como los estadios de fútbol, que siempre vemos llenos de gente, cuando ya no hay nada. Ver qué ocurre después de un Mundial, cómo se quedan esos lugares destinados a miles de personas que lo han sido todo durante tres meses y que de repente están vacíos. Puede pasar cualquier cosa. O eso es lo que yo imagino. En la pintura en general hay un momento en que empiezo a no interesarme tanto por la figura humana como por lo que afecta a esa figura humana. En ese sentido hay un desvío de lo que es el personaje para realizar un enfoque hacia el fondo. Ahí hay implícitamente un interés por lo ambiental, ahí está toda la escenografía de las películas de David Lynch, esas telas rojas y esos suelos negros y blancos, esas esculturas extrañas que afectan al espectador de una manera tan emocional y tan bestial. También hay un interés por la música sin voz, la música ambiental, imaginar cómo suenan los lugares que habitan esos personajes.
¿Qué supone para ti la música y los sonidos y cómo abordas este campo dentro de tu producción?
La música empieza incluso antes que la obra plástica. Recuerdo que a mis 16 ó 17 años me compré un multipistas de casette y recuerdo grabar dos pistas en una cara y otras dos en la otra haciendo pequeñas composiciones. Me interesa la composición por capas, esos añadidos, la repetición, la estratificación en músicos como Steve Reich o Philip Glass. Cómo generan profundidad, formas y geometrías a partir de sonidos, como en “Music for 18 Musicians” (1974-1976) de Reich, elaborando estructuras que se añaden poco a poco y que, por supuesto, se relacionan de manera intrínseca con el resto de mi producción. La música es un medio potentísimo para generar emociones diferentes a las que provoca la obra plástica.
¿Y te sientes más cómodo con un campo de producción que con otro?
En general, la obra con la que me siento más incómodo es la que más alegrías me da y esa es la obra sobre papel. Su factura es bastante incómoda, es un trabajo muy cerebral, muy contenido, requiere horas de trabajo, procesos lentos. Siempre está la ansiedad de verlas acabadas. Entrar al estudio, verla después de 6 meses y todavía sin acabar es bastante difícil. Periodos tan largos obligan a volcar muchos temas personales. Por el contrario, la pintura es para mí muy cómoda por puro contraste, desde el olor de los materiales, del aguarrás, del aceite de lino, ya me engancho. Y volver a ello es maravilloso.
No me gustaría terminar esta conversación sin preguntarte por el futuro, ya que en tus obras lo que viene y lo que está sucediendo siempre está ligado y parece incluso que ya ha pasado, así que ¿dónde te ves dentro de diez años?
Probablemente en Madrid, en un estudio con luz natural, en un contexto no muy diferente del que estoy. Seguir rodeado de artistas a los que quiero y admiro un montón y ampliar la red de relaciones, tanto profesionales como humanas. Y seguir expandiendo mis paisajes.
Iván López Munuera. Es crítico y comisario independiente de arte contemporáneo. Licenciado en Historia del Arte por la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, explora la inscripción del arte contemporáneo en el contexto crítico de las ciencias sociales y en los estudios de medios. Ha realizado labores de comisariado, documentación y gestión en instituciones como Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, ACAX (Agency for Contemporary Art Exchange), Ludwig Museum, Matadero Madrid, ARCO, MAPFRE Foundation, Comunidad de Madrid, Fundación Suñol o el Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales. Publica regularmente en medios como ‘El País, ‘Arte y Parte’, ‘Goya’, ‘Lápiz’, ‘Pasajes de Arquitectura y Crítica’, ‘Pasajes Diseño’ o ‘Urgente’. Actualmente es profesor en IE University y ha sido tutor de ‘Arte Latinoamericano en el Siglo XX’ de la Universidad de Georgetown. Ha impartido conferencias en numerosos foros académicos, como la Universidad Complutense, la Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid, la Universidad Europea de Madrid, la Universidad Carlos III, el Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid, el CENDEAC o el Instituto Europeo di Design. Es director y presentador del programa de entrevistas Fuzzy Now Broadcasting TV; miembro de la Plataforma Curatorial para jóvenes comisarios; y del grupo de trabajo e investigación de Matadero-Madrid El Ranchito.
http://www.fuzzynowbroadcastingtv.blogspot.com/
[1] Kubler, George. La configuración del tiempo. Trad. Jorge Luján. Ed. Nerea. Madrid, 1988.
[2] La historiografía artística –en especial la de raíz germana- ha mezclado de manera recurrente ambos conceptos, el de tiempo biológico y el de cronológico, para explicar ideas como el auge o la decadencia de un estilo, equiparándolo al discurrir de la vida, a la juventud o a la vejez. Así, Riegl, Worringer, Winckelmann…
La isla de los voraces
Exposición “Que el destino de las cosas se decida en lugares pequeños”. Graciela García
Camino por un desayuno que es un campo de golf, que es una isla, que es un jardín donde la maleza de filigrana descubre tesoros de mentira, ecos de objetos cuya esencia se perdió.
Disfruto de un paseo con elipsis y apenas me doy cuenta, pero cada vez que retorno al sendero tengo un tamaño diferente. Quizás si muerdo ese dónut vuelva a mi tamaño de siempre, pero ¿quién lo desea? Mejor no resistirse y dejarse llevar por la fuerza de lo suave o esta pesadilla de azúcar.
Una miniatura es la réplica abarcable de una supuesta realidad. En ella nos comprendemos. Una vieja costumbre burguesa lleva a la gente a dimensionar sus posesiones encargando su reproducción a escala. Estas pequeñas piezas vuelven inofensivo aquello que representan y permiten observarlo desde varios puntos al tiempo, para dejar claro quién posee a quién.
Este jardín de miniaturas sostiene un discurso fragmentario, quizás por sus perspectivas imposibles
soldadas con trampantojos. Parece responder a la misma necesidad que los gabinetes de curiosidades, a una pulsión coleccionista que abarca todo tipo de objetos forzando relaciones entre ellos para recrear un universo abarcable. Se sabe que el primer nombre de El Jardín de las Delicias fue Una Pintura sobre la Variedad del Mundo. Como en el célebre tríptico, la línea del horizonte en La Isla de los Voraces se sitúa muy arriba, para permitir que nos adentremos en una red de detalles inestables. Como ante un decorado fantástico para niños, sentimos una extraña tensión. Lo que parece ingenuo esconde algo peligroso, más inquietante cuanto más edulcorado.
Esta exposición Que el Destino de las Cosas se Decida en Lugares Pequeños es discretamente voraz, como el más modesto de los caprichos.