Formal Modification, Cosmetic Layer.

I have a new show coming up, and while curating, it’s been good to reevaluate things that I had done in the past, and to compare them to the recent work made in Korea. What is surprising are not the differences, but the similarities between now and before, and in realizing this I have become aware of a habit that I’m starting to consider very essential to my modus operandi. Maybe I had tried to describe it before but had failed, but here is another attempt.

Yesterday, Cigarette Piece (Which from now on I will rename Cigarette Tapestry) was unrolled for the first time since I had packed to leave Rhode Island. It is now stretched like a rug in the center of the room, surrounded by purple paintings that hover above it as if curiously inspecting the new member of the family. And in fact, these pieces are distant relatives; created in different continents by the same hand. It was while I was looking at the tapestry that I realized that conceptually there is a link between the works; these pieces are all made with the intention of bringing attention to some sort of abandoned or half-forgotten artifact (I’ve called the artifact an icon in other occasions).

In Cigarette Tapestry the artifact is the cigarette filter, and its original attributes are present in the final product. Yet the intention is not to make assemblages out of found objects, but to bring an artifact from its current state to one of more relevance, or in other words, to update it. Instead of transformation, the process is one of renewal. The original artifact must stay true to itself since it is preservation that instigates the creation of a work of art. But more importantly than staying true to itself, the artifact must be challenged with additional elements. In the case of the Cigarette tapestry, the modification is mainly formal. The cigarettes are dissected, the butts extracted and sliced, and then they are glued together into a piece of fabric with different patterns.

This process of modification, whatever it may be, which I have called a cosmetic layer in more recent writing, has an advanced effect on figurative paintings. The diva paintings, and the ones of Casa Gutierrez, emerged from certain artifacts, including videos, photographs, and objects, just like the tapestry emerged from cigarette butts. All works have a kind of original artifact within them, which is then formally modified. The most recent works are figurative, and in being so, the modification not only affects them formally but also pictorially. The main difference between the tapestry and the recent work is that the figurative paintings seem to speak more directly about memory than the former.