By Joaquín Cociña

“I am writing, certainly, without having seen the exhibition, composing a text out of bits of the project, the photos, the conversations; maybe writing this is a little like writing fantastic literature. In any case, it’s an exercise to open a conversation about the exhibition”1.

Writing about the work En Tránsito had me troubled, but I got out thanks to that brief text from Adriana Valdés. I only had seen “live” some of the participant’s artworks. The majority had come to me attached, compressed, mediated in its most radical and semi-private term: e-mail.

The ones who study Art in South America and take Occidental Art History courses, receive an education based on different types of lighting projections one after another, while a professor explains the materiality of Rembrandt’s paintings, the North American painting dimensions in the 60’s… And where a Lucian Freud of 40 x 70 cm and 2 cm of depth, becomes a 200 x 230 cm image without a thickness.

Being sorry is inoperative. The point is that for an art student, historic paintings are projected files, but for that same student and future artist, the act of painting is a material job, like all pictorial acts.

That fact that painting has turned to photography and the mediated images has not resolved the problem. That which Benjamín called aura –term over chewed on, but inevitably ductile- shows us that the paintings we seem to appreciate are far away, a lot farther than our computer screens. What we see is residual, a radicalization of the copy and original problems. To doubt if there’s an original or not doesn’t work very much, it gives freedom sensations, but overwhelms.

In a past exhibition, while I was hanging a series of drawings, the local guard said to me: “…the photos are pretty”. As I explained to him that they were drawings and not photos, he asked me: “And how long did it take you to make the photos?”. I then understood that for him, a photo is not an analog or digital photosensible print, but an image that corresponds to a certain type. A blurred line separates the different types of images that are produced and perceived. Then, in that indetermination, it is worth asking which the space in where painting plays in is.

En Tránsito is a painting exhibition. It’s not a version or a rereading, the artworks present themselves as traditional paintings. But it’s the treatment and the references that make them to group in a problematic manner. The works have photography and other images as a reference, but also they have the immanent presence of the relationship between copy and original, merged in an affective bond of the image.

The artists of En Tránsito know that the images are coded, they know that it’s not the same to pretend to paint “what it’s seen” than painting absorbing elements of other codes, but their paintings face their references affectively. Barthes would probably be happy, but would say that those paintings have lost their punctum. On the other hand, Gerhard Ritcher once said that he painted based on photos to give these last ones a sense and direction. What’s left? A confusion. And in that confusion between the original and copy, between reference, image and surface, between coldness and affection, it can be talked about a transit between different points. But that confusion, where a no less confused painting is inserted, has a clear ending point: an exhibition that’s attended, where the old movement of confronting the paintings and seeing them live is produced, with all the material aspects that are blurred as they are formatted. Maybe that’s the space in which painting plays: the physical space, concrete and performative in which the artworks are set to be seen.

Finally, a last question without an answer. We should remember –How to forget it?- that these paintings are South American, people located in a place where there’s not precisely a lack of limits and definitions that can be celebrated as a post modern achievement. If the problem or the situation is the blurred line and the transit between the images and the similarity, the not central role of Latin American painters cannot be ignored. The action of painting is already a weird assimilation, taken out of proportion (as Valdés would say). But –and not as an answer, but as an escape route- that problem of uncertainty is present, as it’s already said, in the artistic education. If taking this as a virtue is irresponsibility, ignoring it is even worse.