Carolina Lara B.

AAlfons Hug came from Ushuaia to our country in a search for new talents and to add them to Sebastián Preece and Claudia Aravena, who already integrated their projects.

“The world should be contemplated from its margins”, declares Alfons Hug, curator of the 2nd Biennial of The End of the World. The event goes on till May 25 in Ushuaia (Tierra del Fuego, Argentina), Punta Arenas and the Antarctic, proposing new views about the contemporary situation. Hug sees the biennial in the actual context of financial crisis.

Since it has firstly affected the situation of painting in the market, an answer from art is the pre-eminence of the video, of projects in situ and low tech strategies, present tendencies in Ushuaia. “In front of the traditional metropolis crisis and the modernist project, other development systems and human interactions are possible. And this territory, one of the most extreme of the planet, is propitious of thinking of a new world”, insists the German expert, curator of two versions of the biennial of Sao Paulo and director of the Goethe Institute in Río de Janiero, Brazil.

This Biennial has a utopian meaning. Also an unusual poetic tone for the actual art, proposing -under the concept “In the open”- forms that work with the landscape and a reflection about the relation between men with nature. “It’s a return to the landscape not so much about the contingency or concepts, but more about the ‘climatic change’ and the ecology”, says the curator. Very interested in our country, he was in Santiago just after inaugurating the reunion in late April.

“Events like the Biennial of Ushuaia and the future Triennial of Chile (October – December) should contribute with creativity to new readings of art”, he adds. “I see here a very productive scene, diversified in the canvas, conceptually original and rich”, he writes. The author already works with Chilean artists. Within the 43 international artists, the Biennial of The End of the World integrates three nationals: painter Patricia Claro with a video as a central proposal; Pol Taylor, Scottish architect, Valparaíso resident, designing the construction of a multidisciplinary project in the Antarctic; and, in the Regional Museum of Magallanes (Punta Arenas) until June 15, Sebastián Preece with “The greenhouse man”, installation that picks found objects and structures used by fishermen and farmers from the zone. Hug has followed Preece for some years.

“Within the field of the sculpture and installation, he is an important artist in South America. He knows how to grasp visual spark from any material”, he highlights. In 2010, he will take it to an exhibition in Brazil. For that same year, with Goethe he prepares an itinerant exhibition in commemoration of the Bicentenary of 10 Latin-American Countries. Within the selection of the 10 respective artists, he includes “because of quality and affinity to the topic” a Chilean woman, Claudia Aravena. The piece of work “Less time than place” will talk about “the option of freedom in history and the independence of South America through a contemporary reading”, it will be coming in May to Matucana 100.

By Ignacio Villegas

It could be obvious, but I cannot cease mentioning this as initial point: the ways to appropriate our surroundings and understanding its process, have changed radically since Kant, towards the end of 1780 , spoke about nature as the beautiful atmosphere which art is in charge of.

Beauty as formal purpose – said Kant – can be appreciated by all senses and constitutes by the same valid form, although subjective, to familiarize, further more if we know that to reach this knowledge it is by the power of judging through pleasure, which is what we identify as “taste”. The own judgment validity done in relation to our surroundings (nature, as said by Kant), created in subjective understanding, is an element enabling us to execute a piece of art. We capture the ambience and elaborate an image having the capacity of transforming experience into representation; I am not talking about figure, but solely about the act of constructing images with the load of experience that our environment offers.

The reason why I started talking about Kant and some of his “Tercera Crítica” contents is because the way of handling reality, the atmosphere or nature –as said by Kant– has suffered a perceptive alteration (Logic Phenomena) in such way that we have our visual and affective experiences to capture. This change has taken radical matters about concept validity like the beautiful, aesthetic or about the artwork’s value.

If before than photography, communication globalization and the world’s “shrinkage” through multiple journeys, we could only have the opportunity of one, or few, direct experiences with our setting; today instead, we can agree direct and indirectly to the memory of that experience several times. Multiple times. The journeys and scenery optic and digital capture allow it.

Elements included in “Crítica del Juicio” or also known as “Crítica del Discernimiento” or “Tercera Crítica”, written in 1788 by I. Kant (1724–1804) and published in 1876.

That is exactly the practice that makes Claro and Concha’s artwork constitute a relation in the moment of talking about the ways of immediate setting capturing, in the postmodern era. Years passed in which landscape painters would position their easels next to the river to paint, like one of the few opportunities of capture. Now, we perceive, capture and invent, almost like an obvious and natural procedure; some artists even download their references from the Internet, now that they do not consider as a requirement, the immediate atmosphere experience. In other words, the capacity of transforming experience into representation, and can be measured by resources beyond the own perception (in this case, visual).

Concha lived in southern Chile (2001-2007) and had more than five years to capture the landscape as experience and transfer it into her painting. In the course of its process, the photograph was simply the capture of the moment, allowing her to recreate the experience. Nevertheless, the photograph, in the construction process of María José Concha’s composition, does not enter the workroom; it is not a direct reference, or a procedural resource, it is only there to recreate –I insist– the experience gained from the visited site, when the author requires it. Alike the effect of the family album photograph.

Claro’s case is different; the image captured in the experienced moment of the landscape takes part in the composition’s construction procedure. Its capture does not pretend to recreate the experience, on the contrary, it goes beyond experience. It is a capture of shapes, colors and textures allowing recreating the visual experience of the visited prospect, through the making of masks that permit spreading and impasto.

In both cases, however, the artwork’s experience and construction are relevant subjects to comprehend:
a) The way in which two artists present the same theme, and yet take on completely different productive performances.
b) How two artists, under dissimilar images, assume a same topic (the landscape).
c) How two artists, under different technical and instrumental procedures, achieve results that begin from a similar subject (capture of the surround).
It is this interchange of similarities and differences, what finally explains the act of pertinent reflection, with regard to this exhibition, about the change that the ways of capturing our atmosphere has suffered. Because of this, the concepts of landscape, nature and reality have changed.

Ignacio Villegas
May 2007