The title of the present exhibition Let Us Now Praise Famous Men refers to the book of the same name written by James Agee and illustrated with photographs by Walker Evans. Published in 1941, it documented rural life in the United States during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Francis Ruyter uses appropriationism as a tool; all the paintings have as reference photographs of the huge patrimony treasured by the Library of Congress of the United States. It is one of the largest archives in the world created from the funds of the Farm Secure Administration and the Office of War Information: black and white images that portray the life of the Americans between 1935 and 1944. These images, produced through gubernamental agencies, transcend the propaganda and, at the end, have become a reference for the American identity. It is a file reviewed by multiple authors with a generative character as it is digitized and disseminated.

The archival objects of the post-industrial era have already been subjected to systems of order and reclassification and lately they are divided in a global scheme through the Internet. The growing presence of data banks, image files and visual interfaces allow us to trace Ruyter’s interest in photographic archives. This can be compare with technological ruins that face the changes of the scientific and social knowledge that provides Ruyter’s paintings a contextual depth of referents connected by interrelated nodes.

The artistic process of Francis Ruyter merges new technologies with traditional techniques of drawing and painting. Ruyter uses monochrome paint and permanent marker to recreate the images of these photographs. These works deployed visually as abstract paintings despite their figurative origin. We are faced with synthetic works with a marked tone reduction, painted with non-naturalistic colours at all, and composed of energetic colour planes. This saturated chromaticism comes violent in conflict with our perception of the photographic act as a graphic document that brings verisimilitude to the image. The contours divide the surface into planes of shadows clueless in a representation in which the illusion of depth is eliminated. This denial of the volume reduces to the minimum expression the photographic origin of the image as the language of light and emphasizes the markedly two-dimensional character of the work.

 

Without any doubt drug trafficking and the war against drugs in Mexico has generate a rich popular imagination around it. This set of strongly symbolic images has disrupted lot of the relations that we build with the culture that drift in the drugs world and with the nature related to it.

The case of poppies (Papaver Rhoeas L.)  is definitive of this demonization of the nature related with drugs. Once common silvester plant, today is a beautiful flower demonized for its uses on the production of narcotics, for this reason, its a flower that have lost its natural condition on the loose. It has turned in a covert flower, prisoner in the clandestine laboratories of drugs.

In a very acute way, Teresa Serrano has treated not only  with reflexión and criticism but also poethicaly the politics related with the war against drugs in her native country, Mexico, starting with the poppies as a powerful argument.

In 2016, she dedicated herself to the production of 24 poppies that, like the artista explain, were “directly painted with acrylics on Fabriano paper, Strathmore and Canson paper folders, without previous drawing. Paintings made in a purist and botanic way. They are tribute to the beautiful flower of the poppy, red and velvety flower that produces heroine. Due to the war against drug trafficking in Mexico, the flower doesn’t grow spontaneously in the field. It has being stigmatized. It is just in possession of the traffickers that have caused the death of more than 60.000 deaths in mexican land, that reminds to a mass grave of missing persons”

This repetitive gesture around reproduction of poppies that reminds the well known aphorism of Gertrude Stein: “a rose is a rose is a rose”, had in turn its counterpart in a video production: technique in which Teresa Serrano is pioneer in Latin America.

Her video Amapola also from 2016, is a paradigmatic work not only because of the topic by itself but also of the artistic production of this important Mexican artist. On it, she recovers the flower from its stigma, and in a gesture of resistance against its negative condition, enriches it from a kinder and more universal imagination, because Teresa Serrano sings Amapola in her video, a very famous song of the cadiz composer José María Lacalle: a popular and classical hymn about this flower. The video undoubtedly puts both universes in tension – the negative, represented in a single poppy in the middle of a vast field – and the positive, embodied in the romantic and sentimental song of Lacalle.

However, The forgotten history of the first drug war is an even more suggestive project because it crystallizes the historical dimension that the work of this artist already has, showing the attentive look that Serrano has always devoted in his work to the  sexual, social, political and religious tensions in the world of today. This is evidenced by the incorporation into the exhibition of six historical pieces, made a quarter of a century before and on this same subject.

In 1993 Teresa Serrano addressed the problems of what was then the first war on drugs in a series of diptychs made with collage and painting. In these works the artist incorporates the poppies from an imaginative register in which the flower was not the secret and negative plant of our days, even though during those years she was suffering her first battles from the Mexican anti-narco organizations and the American DEA. In the diptychs, the flowers face their derived products from the commercial scope of old and kind pharmaceutical advertisements. This “mirroring” condition is doubled since the collage is made with the proper ads of the poppy derivatives while the painting and the drawing delineates the flowers themselves.

These diptychs announced in turn, thanks to the textual inscriptions of Serrano, that the present of the flower was that of his first war. Paradoxically, these sentences placed the beautiful painted or drawn poppies and their pharmaceutical products in the romantic space of their history.

With The forgotten history of the first drug war the artist reminds us that this war is already a forgotten story (and perhaps a lost war) and that the poppy is living a permanent conflict for its natural subsistence away from this rather artificial war against drug trafficking and his negative imaginary. At least the poppy survives, against the current of its disappearance, in the intelligent and subtle work of Teresa Serrano.

Carlos Palacios

The Colombian artist Catalina Jaramillo presents her latest work  Las Palabras del Optimista around the sixth edition of ArtNou Barcelona 2017, event that is responsible for generating a boost to emerging art and the new artistic generations. 

Jaramillo is a young artist  graduated in visual arts in the National University of Colombia. Her work revolves around contemplation, with constants reference to literature, fiction and her own biography using the drawing in non-traditional media. Her pieces has been exhibited individually in deferents galleries in Latin America.

Stephan Balkenhol is characterized by his strive to reground figurative sculpture. His ability to
carve, alongside a constant investigation of the role of sculpture within the contemporary art
production, make him stand out from the prevailing tendencies. The artist uses soft wood, such
as Popler and Wawa, which can be seen in the reminiscent chisel marks, cracks or knots left as a
hint to his technique. Balkenhol uses for the most of his works a single block of wood,
polychromatic, delimiting the sculpture from its own pedestal, which is carved in a totem style.
His way of carving wood is, in a way, a continuation of the popular and medieval techniques.

The human figure is usually the driving force of his work. His characters are generally
anonymous men and women, with expressionless faces that are often depicted standing and
ordinarily dressed. Their postures, however, seem rather trivial and mysterious. The lack of
expression makes the game of interpretation quite difficult, but its presence hooks the viewer
to the gaze of these human sized figures. Elements that can be regarded as capricious, such as
the position of the hands or the inclination of the heads, become the hidden keys that reveal
the relationship between the figures, as well as tightening the link between the statues, the
viewer and the locations they occupy.

Balkenhol is able to strengthen his work with the viewer, who immerses himself In a deep
atmosphere of complicity. It is his link with what is contemporary that makes him differ
between sculptural scale, which he takes to be the ideal scale, and the human scale, considered
the mere standard. The artist says the following, as a way of inviting us to dechypher his secret
‘my sculptures do not narrate. There is something secret about them and It is not I who ought
to betray their secret’.