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28/11/2007

Valeriano Lopez

Juana de Aizpuru Gallery, Madrid

A project, which refers to history and the City of Granada particularly, and positions itself towards it and from its present. There isn’t any historic erudition on the different piece’s proposals which, just as a puzzle, make up the project, but there is knowledge about history, and of the tradition that conceals it, even though we know that both are mere socio-cultural constructions that respond to interests determined by the dominant power.

The methodology he used consists in condensing a group of signs and symbols, just as hit events and emblematic icons from the city, which has a lot, (possibly dominating the top places in a historic-events-hit-parade) and parody them. It is out of all doubt the historic meaning of the city and its culture splendor, which during the European Middle Ages had its ‘centre and sepulcher’. Along with another distinguishing characteristic: it didn’t have a Christian Middle Age but a Muslim one; besides being the venue, the great city’s frame, from the agreement between the Catholic Kings and Colon for setting out on his trip to the so called ‘Discovery of America’, once conquered to the Muslims and completed in Granada “the unity of Spain on January 2nd 1492” and with it the born of the fist Nation-State that supposed the beginning of the modern time for Europe, which now has no boundaries, while paradoxically contemplates how, in Ulrich Beck’s words, in the globalized world there is an extended illusion: “the reactionary fiction of the National”.

The beginning with Romance, besides, doesn’t stop being a game motivated by all the meanings that the work by Valeriano López contains and has developed in its path of the last fifteen years. However his is not an innocent game but, and we aren’t afraid to say so, somewhat perverse; if art (always in lower case) is a game for him, it is in the sense that it allows him to create devices that could work as revulsive toys, something like the action of a “bad” kid dismantling (i.e. deconstructing) the tank or the gun in question to blow its hell out, or their mechanisms, up side down and shut the shrapnel in another direction; subvert them to articulate new correlations in the programmed order, in its circulation and use, and in the symbology they generate in popular imaginary.

(…) This quickly locates us in some aesthetic assumptions from which Valeriano Lopez parts, in the appropriationism as critical and cultural discourse which during the 80’s served from the free image manipulation and from the manipulation strategy itself, from which capital and communication media are controlled; new produced images with the appropriation resources subvert and reactivate concepts as moral codes that represent or symbolize a dominant social order, questioning established models and revealing their interests and plots. The manipulation to which the artist puts some kind of images and found objects, in a new turns from the Duchamp-ready-make, causes a kind of misunderstanding, which, at the same time, provoke some an expanded framework of production of meaning, as well as different ways established by the hegemonic rules to approximate to reality and new interpretations of it.

(…) A result of it is the misunderstanding or game between grenade and the pomegranate fruit, identifying symbol and the city’s institutional frame as shown in the historic banner: four pomegranates surrounding the eagle with the coat of arms. The hidden face of this standard of beautiful embroidered in gold pomegranate on crimson velvet, is also a result of bloody struggles both intern and extern that the city suffered from VIII Century to XVI (since the myth of the coexistence between cultures and religions in Al Andalus, and the kingdom of Granada, is another historic construction which contradicts the facts that relegate as useless the exemplary agreements figured by the Catholic Kings, from the Santa Fe agreements to deliver the city by the last Muslim King, or like the baptism submission decreed by Cisneros Cardinal in 1499, or the prohibition by Doña Juana of the garments of captives, or the prohibition of language by Felipe II, giving place to the Moorish’s rebellion and keeping the blood running).

In the logic of these events, events from a city which through its history has attended towards itself (also mentioned in the Romances collection Civil Wars in Granada), and which, is in the struggle for power that doesn’t give the destruction of knowledge, science and culture, its hardly surprising that Valeriano Lopez uses the grenade as a revulsive, as a device thrown over the own city with the intention that this throwing hits, at least, the inflexibility.

(…) The own historic events, and their official and current representations, favour so that Valeriano López articulates the game of the mistaken homonymic relation between the city and the grenade, leitmotiv that generated all the pieces that compose the project, both the ones that represent directly the City’s symbol and the ones that are produced by the City.

(…) Valeriano López created the “explosion” space as a transactional space where all the different meanings of the works are being negotiated (in shapes, which can be vanishing lines or meeting points). These shapes, formalized already in digital photographs, videos, installations, objet trouvés, sculptures (he parts from an aesthetic post-media conception), are disposed answering a net conception which connections produce short circuits and with this new perceptions and sense movements. Also, for putting us closer to the project’s space, the simile with game machines (not in vane, one of his emblematic works, “ESTRECHO ADVENTURE” –1996 parts from the structure and aesthetic of a videogame). We can stand, in space, as if we were in front of a pin ball machine at the moment when the ball is shot and is the explosive shell which liberates the explosions, of different intensity, looking for crashes, encounters, victories… in a journey that is as controlled as random.

(…) Valeriano López elaborated all the fitting pieces and some grenades let others pass with the idea of provoking looks towards the city or turning mirrors over their own reality, a history of fierce in the past which in some way, and this is what interests him, continues in a lot of aspects reflected on a present, which is far away from historic fatality and bloody confrontations, is still hooked in the past which has been faked (Umberto Eco was one of the first to do an essay talking about past and culture fetishisms), to be able to live from it, or surviving the story, “the story of the Alhambra, of course”.

Opening 29 november 2007

Juana de Aizpuru Gallery
Calle Barquillo, 44 Madrid
Free Admission

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