METAEUPHORIA, FROM THE FILIATIONS SERIES

Leonel Luna + Luis Benedit + Leandro Katz | 2014

Effective affinities are always a mystery. Why is one thing next to another? What is it about an art piece that fascinates us and questions us? What makes an artist not only a colleague but a friend and a partner, an adventure companion? Or, in more concrete terms: how is it that that breach on the ground coexists and sympathizes with the Gauchito Gil altar and the Difunta Correa? Why is it that Rogelio Yrurtia's "Monument to Work" makes us turn, over and over again, around the Paseo Colon roundabout to understand its strange order? In short... what roads brought Leonel Luna, Leandro Katz and Luis Benedit together?

The first answer that comes to my mind is that they are the perverse of history. They inoculate the past with the liquid of the present and distort it so as to make it more real. They visit an image or an object and recreate it, or retitle it or put it along some other one that disturbs it. This takes us to the second answer: the three of them are montage artists. Only not any kind of montage, but the one that enters the image or object to dismount it in order to exhibit its untimely and violent character. If history domesticated that image, they will be there to reopen it and show all the fury and violence. And the three of them do it in very different ways. That is the third answer to the question about affinities: the three are together because of the divergences and singularities. The montage of the incompatible that they apply in their work also applies to the encounter that takes place in this site. But let’s break it down into its parts.

Affinities with the divergent: Benedit and Luna work with the field. Katz comes from the big city. Luna has recently become more urban with his surgery on Rogelio Yrurtia’s Chant to Work; however, he still places his characters in a wooded environment. The three artists are obsessive investigators and build up systems with what they gather up: the system of objects that are turned sinister by the mere operation of framing, by the siege of historical artwork from the present, by the images that take position.

Additionally, Benedit arrives from the other side to bring those objects from the countryside that were originally intended for manual tasks and that Argentine events have burdened with a disturbing significance. As if torture was the clearest testimony of the fact that we stopped being human. The bull-holder tong, the emasculator or the sheep shears sit there in little boxes, disabled, but we can’t help but shiver at their sight.

Montage artists: montage unites and divides, separates or combines, merges or disconnects, associates and splits. The important thing in this relationship is the letter “Y” [Translator’s Note: “Y” is Spanish for “and”], that Latin letter that is fortunately shaped in the form of two trails that come together or one that branches off, depending on how you look at it. The important thing here is also the “O” [TN: “O” is Spanish for “or”], which is like a closed circle or an open mouth. Conjunctions and dysfunctions, conjunctions or disjunctions. Leandro Katz summarized it in a formula: Y/O [TN: "And/Or"]. But the formula, of course, allows a different interpretation: it is an "I" split into its core [TN: original text quotes "YO", Spanish for "I". Therefore, "YO" splits into "Y/O", being "I" split into "And/Or"]. The viewer, also split, must gather the images of ruin and link them together: not only by pairs (freedom and communism, the statue and the flag, tourism and militancy), but also into different groups (Lenin’s red flags and the Gaucho Gil’s red flags). Montage –as Katz shows us- is about all that exceeds us.

The perverse of history: the country instruments observed from our recent history, the overlapping of the eye and the mask in our mind, the works of art that are our historic heritage.

In “Chant to Work”, Leonel Luna addresses Rogelio Yrurtia (he had also done it before with Blanes, Guinnard, etc) and draws on the sculptor’s enigmatic phrase: “A chant to love, a representation of what woman means in a man’s life; she takes us from anguish to family’s triumph”. The crossed man, the woman gazing at the horizon, the family that the first bodies seem to form (mother, father, three sons); it is all destabilized in Luna’s remake. It goes from stone to cardboard, from erection to inclination to rummage around the remains. Such is the way the artist goes. He transforms the march into a dance and the woman does not convey us to family but to lust, which deviates us from work.

Branching trails that come across. These are the curious perverse of history, the montage artists, the ones that mysteriously meet in a room.

Gonzalo Aguilar, June 2014