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24/5/2007

Samuel Salcedo

Galleria 3Punts, Barcelona

Like the panic about dying a ridiculous death...

On their first date Juan tells Maripili: “Come on, get undressed and put this Ikea bag on your head.”
She resign herself to it as a necessity, wanting to make a good impression.

If one wanted to make a slighty slanted reading of Sigmund Freud’s book “Civilization and its Discontents”, one could conclude that human beings are worthless. I don’t doubt that Freud would subscribe to this, since a greta part of his frustrations came from trying to assert that the rational, independent and civilized human being is still under the influence of a number of desires, passions, fears and instincts which he is unable to control. This is the moment in which culture is born, covering this harsh reality like a satin wrapper, helping man to forget how close he is to passion, violence, and submitting to dark and powerful instincts.

Samuel Salcedo seems to have understood this and his work he helps us to approach the more absurd, cruel and crude side of human existence. Eliminating the contextual elements from his paintings and sculptures, that is to say, abstracting the subjects from their cultural surroundings. Salcedo illuminates all of our best kept secrets. When we lower our defenses and allow ourselves to follow the rules of desire, when we begin to forget what we have learned, when norms and behavioral conditioning vanish and we decide to undress and start skipping on top of an upturned basin – in that moment Salcedo lights a lamb for us which illuminates everything clearly.

In tthis way we see how the ironic, the crude, the absurd and the often disagreeable meet in his work, in a kind of private and intimate chronicle. But Salcedo takes pictorial tradition a step further, where the interiors are no longer humid windows that we lean on to cure our lovelessness and instead become places where we can reflect on our human condition.

When we come across poster-carriers on the streets, or rather peolpe who are paid to carry placards on their bodies advertising one product or another, one realises how absurd existence can be, full of worries and experiences, suffering through 8 hours of every day supporting a piece of wood around one’s neck. In the work of Samuel Salcedo we see how these daily absuridties multiply: when we take a ticket and have to wait hours for our turn, when we suck more saliva into our mouths before flirting withs a stranger, when we look at ourselves in the mirror and realise that we no longer have abdominal muscles, when we panic about dying a ridiculous death.

Nature is wise and has equipped us with a culture that helps us forget ourselves, and so to avoid crises, but if someone removes that culture, puts a mirror in front of us to show us our reality, then we’ll be confronted by unthinkable images, the b-sides of our lives. They are images which we might not enjoy watching but which are nonetheless real. It’s here tahat the magic of Samuel Salcedo’s work resides, in uncovering the things which many of us would choose to forget.
Jaron Rowan

Galleria 3Punts
C/Aribau, 75 - Barcelona
Free admission

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