The JM Gallery is presenting an interpretive project in ARCO08; it is integrated into the program, ARCO 40 and featuring recent works from three of the gallery’s most notable artists: Irene Andessner, Iván Pérez and Carlos Schwartz. This joint offering proposes a new way of looking at the concept of aesthetic representation, understood as a place of meeting and enlightenment, exploration and change; at the same time, it suggests a revision of the contemporary definition of identity, taking into account the developments and mutations of culture and society. These displays of formats and mediums are associated with light, and the idea of elevation or ascension; they attempt to offer a reflection, on various levels, about the possibilities of vision in a world saturated with images of diverse origins. They propose, in this sense, a redefinition of the critical models with which the onlooker can understand and relate to the artistic works.
The gallery’s project is composed of the following proposals from each of these three artists:
Maternoster (2006) is the central idea of Irene Andessner’s contribution. It consists of a work presented in two mediums. On one hand, it contains a video of an interactive performance that she carried out in the elevator of the historic Federal Headquarters of Industry, in Vienna. On the other, it contains photographs of 32 scenes that correspond to the same performance. Her concept was to play with cultural pretenses related to feminine identity throughout history (the mother, the whore, the virgin) and invert the patriarchal dominance of a world of business and industry; she even temporarily feminized the name of the building, Paternóster, for Maternóster (“Our Mother”). To do this, she assumes the characterization of four mythical, maternal figures: Alma Mater, Mary of Nazareth, Mother Courage (Ana Fierling) and Madonna (Louise Veronica Ciccone), going up and down the building’s elevator during four hours. From the project, I Am Irene Andessner, begun in 2005 and still in progress, the gallery presents three, recently completed works. This series is comprised of various photographs and light boxes in which Andessner is portrayed nude, in an artificial space, using mirrors and fictional frames to openly play with the concepts of alterity and identity. The feminine image to which she lends her body and face is, as she herself says, “always fictitious – in the eyes of the onlooker as well as in the eyes of society.” As a result, Andessner decides to utilize the present tense (“I am”) more than the past tense (“I was”) as a method of signalling the transformation of her art in relation to her chameleonic figure. A radical belief in the possibility of expressing identity through change, authenticity through artifice, the essence and presence of women through their images and accessories. Through this series of photographs, she definitively tells us that: “I am another.”
Incorporated as key pieces in the gallery’s project, we find the offering of artist Carlos Schwartz. His proposal deals with works that are impressive in both format and design: a lighted staircase (Ascent) and a neon text quoted from The Gospel of John (John 1.1.) They are two, highly symbolic constructions whose essential elements (the matter, the light, the word) aspire to establish links with the hidden roots of the Western spiritual tradition. They also propose the search for a new sense that better agrees with the contemporary experience and driftings of culture, with the components of that deeply-rooted tradition. The work of Schwartz is strongly linked to aesthetic strategies and esoteric meanings of the antique emblems. For Schwartz, the principal creator of his work is the analogy, the union of two of more symbols with the goal of creating a new allegoric image of the natural world. The artist would live contained in his creative laboratory, like a modern alchemist, manipulating the sources of life and culture, like Faust, in order to extract from them the beginnings of knowledge and beauty.
Iván Pérez is the third artist included in the project for ARCO 40. Habitually moved by research about the representation of daily reality, he has carried out a critical interpretation of social aspects that often pass unperceived; in this occasion, he creates a project, encouraged by the idea of leading us to discover the existing distance between the onlooker and the representation. War museums, the preferred object of Iván Pérez’s new investigations, are abounding in Central Europe and the United Kingdom; his goal is to recreate bellicose, historical actions and show the entire destructive arsenal in the form of objects recycled into works of art. Beyond the disasters and the blood, these museums, that present us with didactic and entertaining horror as a spectacle, are conceived as areas of large visual consumption. In this fashion, Iván Pérez takes us on a touristic journey through a dozen museums and war memorials in Holland and the United Kingdom (Warshow series). His furtive glance dissects reality through a series of startling images that transform us into participants in the consumption and the expectation. A torpedo room in a submarine or a large, anti-air cannon, these are the large-format, photographic images that the artist presents us with in order to initiate the confrontation between reality, simulation, and representation.
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