SITUATION PICTURES

SITUATION PICTURES / REBUILDING AN INVENTION

Borges Cultural Centre | Buenos Aires | 2007

TO BELIEVE OR TO INVENT

Between years 1949 and 1951, during a particularly rich and complex period for plastic arts in Argentina, where opposing tendencies and political arguments were being confronted, a man devoted to the latest avant-garde and concrete art and Madí’s new proposals deemed possible a new art for the Peronist State: a national concrete art that would serve the constructive forces of the people of an immanent argentinity.

With the assignment of placing works by Argentine artists in different public departments, but impeded from summoning artists from the concrete movement for having a regime-opposed political stand, he decides to assemble a work team with four women who worked at the Cultural Promotion Sub-Secretariat of the Ministry of Economy and Public Services and Projects.

For eighteen months, they would have the task of shaping new concrete-inspired pieces of work, which were to be made in the restoration workshops on the last floor of the Ministry building.

Many of these works were installed, and there was almost even a proposal for a concrete version of the Justicialist emblem.

In the year 1951, with the assumption to the National Ministry of Education by Dr. Ivanissevich, who would lead an anti-avant-garde crusade in the field of the arts, the work team was disassembled, the people in charge were retired from the Ministry’s personnel and the art pieces removed and stored in the sheds of the Secretariat of Industry and Commerce -today Puerto Madero- where they would later be lost forever.

However, after the dissolution of the work team, its members completed several wall paintings in commercial galleries until the mid-60s.

Today, the records and photographic documents allow us to partially recompose the facts and some of those pieces, by reconstructing an episode that, although fictional, doesn’t seem less real than its characters, who almost made real the construction of an art for the State over the immutable laws of color and shape.

The current picture is very different, but the struggle and ideals that inspired those artists are still standing.

WHAT WE WISH TO SEE

My work is a position of connection between languages that arise from a blurry area between history and memory, between paint and photography.

In many of my photographs, what is real becomes permeable and ductile, by the side of everything that is improbable in order to construct images that emerge from the viewer’s imagination.

Ultimately, the pieces are what we wish to see.

ACTIVATING THE IMAGES

The reproduction of an image caught through light-impregnation techniques is a perceptive operation that defines itself in an orderliness on a surface and which takes, by means of chemical methods, color and shape.

Something that is ordinarily called photography.

Nowadays, digital tools turn light into information that, once encoded, rearranges itself on a surface in the form of an image. The reading of that information works as a two-dimensional sweep conveying what is three-dimensional to the two-dimensional plane, currently through binary code.

Abstract photography has existed from the beginnings of photography as an autonomous language. In some cases, this is due to casual tests, to technical pursuits and, in many others, it responds to a clear intentionality, to experiments with light, with water, with wind, with speed, with colors, with reality.

The first photographers and artists, such as Stieglitz, Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, used photography as a medium of pursuit, as a plastic and visual language through which they could display their inside world onto the outside; premises from the abstract movement were proposed. According to Picasso, every abstraction comes from a way of seeing reality, but abstraction itself is a mystery in its own reality; a visual suggestion, not a technical riddle.

My photographs deliberately abandon exact reproduction, pursuing the abstraction from its own medium and taking the visible objects to their intrinsic elements.

They renounce to the recognizable object, to the decisive moment, to the conventional perspective, to fidelity to color, to precision on detail and to the reproduction and unlimited circulation of the image.

Besides genres, it is our experience through perception what will activate the images and will determine how real it is what we see or feel in front of us. Something as subjective as true.

Leonel Luna, May 2007

Any resemblance to fiction is pure reality.