Subtext

SUBTEXT

Artists: León Ferrari, Gabriel de la Mora, Cildo Meireles, Oscar Muñoz, Marie Orensanz, Miguel Angel Ríos, Miguel Ángel Rojas, John Sparagana, and Ana Maria Tavares 

By: Ximena Gama

The question that inspired this exhibition is how to investigate the relationship that exists between the image and the word, between the work of a visual artist and that of a writer. These two mediums have always been considered opposite disciplines, and tradition has reduced both to their use value. Words are merely an explanation or translation of art, and the image’s sole objective is to illustrate discourse. To accept their incompatibility, however, ignores their poetic power and their capacity, when they dialogue with each other, to inspire imagination and to create a new reality. This is precisely the idea behind Subtext, an exhibition that brings together a series of contemporary artists from Argentina to Mexico who have straddled this border in order to go beyond it. 

It was on the border between words and images that these artists found a way to approach and understand the tumultuous social reality of Latin America. The poetic search for and the exploration of different media in Latin America responds to the question of how to create an image of a violent event which by its very nature is “unspeakable” and, thus, unrepresentable. This is a question not only of what but also of how to represent it, how to remember it, and how to leave its mark on history. In other words, the intensity of daily life in Latin American inspired many of these artists to go beyond traditional ways of making art, with topics that dealt with violence and political protest finding a place in experimentation. These artists, wanting to do more than just send a clear and direct message to the viewer, took on the difficult task of reading reality and its multiple meanings. One of the ways they found to respond to this problem was by combining word and text as a vehicle to contaminate the formal purity of conceptual art and to add a gesture of political criticism to their work.

It is precisely within this creative space that each one of these artists found ways to protest and to encounter real humanity and to make their protest heard and remembered. The main point of their work was to show how violence interrupts history by destroying meaning and unleashing a crisis of language. On the one hand, memory would no longer be verbalizable in a classical sense but must now also respond to a fracture in history and the visual arts. Hence the importance given by some artists, such as Oscar Muñoz, Marie Orensanz, Ana Maria Tavares, León Ferrari, and Gabriel de la Mora, to words and texts, to archives and documents. On the other hand, political protest should not be a simplistic form of propaganda but should have recourse to irony in order to insert itself into the system and into popular culture, common strategies within the work of Miguel Ángel Rojas, Cildo Meireles, and Miguel Angel Ríos.