Antonio Gonzales Paucar
dal 6/7/2007 al 6/8/2007
Segnalato da
6/7/2007
Antonio Gonzales Paucar
Galerie Davide Gallo, Berlin
In his most recent work, Paucar faces and examines themes dear to South American culture: first of all, poetry as an expressive vehicle for the common consciousness of a people; second, memory associated with travel, and third travel as a way of researching lost time.
Solo show
On July 7th, galerie davide gallo will be pleased to present, in the
project section, the first personal show of South American artist
Antonio Gonzales Paucar. In his most recent work, Antonio Paucar faces
and examines themes dear to South American culture: first of all, poetry
as an expressive vehicle for the common consciousness of a people;
second, memory associated with travel, and third travel as a way of
researching lost time.
However, of primary interest is the creative path that the artist has
used to construct his show and its exposed artworks. Antonio Paucar
recently spent a period of four months in Peru, his country of origin.
During this time, through a conscious drifting which recalls the great
teachings of Guy Debord, the artist worked out a path of travel running
from Lima back to the most recondite places of his youth which also
correspond to some of the least known places of Peruvian geography: the
Amazonas and the Andes. Drifting along this path, Antonio Paucar recalls
certain events and memories, and evokes images.
Little by little, the artist brings these forgotten memories closer.
With this show, Antonio Gonzales Paucar wants to share the documentation
of this process generously with all of us, his friends.
Davide Gallo
Insect chirps, toad croaks and cries of birds in Antonio Gonzales
Paucar's work evoke 'noise scenes' resembling the Amazoian rain forest.
The irritating, muddling sound fields result from precise, strained
central themes, meticulous, as well as from equalizing sound-bodies from
cans and hoses, and are like glowing, crackling bath salts. These are
the sound experiments of Antonio Gonzales Paucar following extensive
research that was conducted without technical support using nature and
industrial materials.
In this magnetic field between nature and domesticated culture arise
video works such as "Composicion Manual" (2007), which is a refined
register of sound produced by the artist using daily objects and
selfconstructed instruments. Alterations of images and shrinking
sequences generates a confusing and dizzying sound picture carousel.
Furthermore, in complex performances that require all the senses of the
observer except sight, Gonzales Paucar creates experiments full of
ritual, which demonstrate his own personal confrontation with his
origins in the Peruvian Andes. The surprising confrontation with natural
smells and tastes of exotic origin, artificially produced with
space-filling sound-collages and different textures, evoke feelings of
'loss of control' in the western observer.
With his sensitive depictions and stagings of nature, Gonzales Paucar
not only highlights cliché images of Latin American identities that have
been passed down, but also transforms them in ways that subtly threaten
the physical integrity of the observer -- subtle threats that are,
however, never validated. In these works, time and space seem to blur,
and with them the alleged existing cultural attributes of nature and
civilization, and of spirituality and rationality.
Gonzales Paucar demonstrates extensive interest in formal expression in
photographic works such as "Maple Insect" (2007), as well as in
installations such as "Dandelions" (Dientes de león, 2006-2007) and
"Shoes that break the silence" (Zapatos que rompen el silencio, 2007).
The artist displays filigree nature forms in needle-sharp close-ups and,
thereby, shows their ephemerality in a very poetic manner. The artist
brings thousands of dandelions together into plastic bags (as containers
of industrial origin) in a manner that gives a sculptural character to
these raw materials. Innumerable, finely arranged, black and silver
resplendent flies evoke, at first glance, fascination, which – on closer
examination -- turns to abhorrence. Gonzales Paucar arranges these
mechanisms of 'being above' with an old pair of black shoes facing one
another -- following an encounter in his youth with an anonymous dead
person, this image symbolizes (for the artist) the beginning of a chain
of political murders in his homeland.
In these works lies as in his previous art of an implicit threat to
physical integrity, which is especially intensified in the photograph
"Altar" (2006) and in the video work "La Resentida" (2007). The
candelabra coming out from the fingers of the artist refers to the
ritualistic employment of the primary element of fire in religious or
pagan cults. At the same time, it inevitably erases the short-lived
beezewax candles, and runs the risk of hurting the artist as the holder
of the candlestick. In "La Resentida", a knife, mirroring the face of a
native Indian, softly strokes extinct Fern plant La Resentida, but in so
doing threatens it causing its leaves to close. Pictorially as
metaphorically, Gonzales Paucar brings up for discussion here, against a
background of disturbing noise, the ambivalence of civilization, which
brings progress, but irreparably destroys existing resources, as the
forest in the Peruvian Amazon region.
Gonzales Paucar's ritualistic employment of nature in the questioning of
his own origin and identity becomes particularly clear in the video work
"Protect me" (Protéjame, 2007) and in the video documented performance
"Dancing with my glowworm" (Danzando con mis luciérnagas, 2007). Similar
to the Cuban artist, Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) in the earth-body-works of
her Silueta series (1973-1980), Gonzales Paucar enters a symbiosis with
the primary element of earth.
However, regarding location, where he realizes his work -- in this case
a corn field in his Andean homeland -- Gonzales Paucar selects a direct
point of reference from his childhood, which he connects with the
processes of sowing and harvesting, as well as with playing with loam
and the surroundings of Adobe houses.
In "Protect me", as well as in "Dancing with my glowworms", the process
is in the foreground. The successive, digitally animated digging tells
about the desired connection of body and hair with the earth. The
fireworks from rockets and miracle candles, burning around Gonzales
Paucars' body, however, recalling the Latin American tradition of music,
dance and pyrotechnics, in which a ritual-detention-cleaning function is
also attributed. The rhythmic movements of the artist underline this
aspect, even when this is conditioned by natural circumstances. Light
and outlines are only visible so long as fire feeds the subject. With
its slow expiring, the darkness swallows all form.
What remains is night.
Kirsten Einfeldt
Galerie Davide Gallo
Linienstrasse 156 - Berlin