Materia prima (monocromías)
Monocromías (Monochromes)
About Alejandra Rojas’ work
I.
In an art scene where some visual strategies are used -defined by the mass media- there are works that define its constitution in physicality. They could be classified into those that work under decorative assumptions that dialogue with a photographic representation and those that define themselves by their constructive exploration, from the language of painting itself.
The painting job is a part of systematic and dedicated work; nowadays it is difficult to think about artists who are not questioning the extensions of painting as a recursive field of conflict with the representation of the cultural industry. On this, the craft and this devote act is a need when we recognize the fact that the artist work in painting is in crisis.
From the gesture produced by Andy Warhol, it has been established a trend that had already been settled by the visual production -mostly generated by Surrealist and Realistic artists- consigning a state of permanent re-appropriation of media and advertising. A. Danto stated against the above: “It strikes me that in the history of Western painting the brush has been invisible for so long, this was something that one could know that was there and that sooner or later would be seen, exactly in the same way that we see points of light from a television monitor sooner or later; just like the points of light, the brush must have a way of providing an image without being part of that image meaning”.(1)
The visual re-appropriation has founded its own label of a displaced image of its functionality, entering to the art field as a strategic way of overstating its semantic features. In this way, the image is going to permeate its communicational origin, multiplying its chances of an extensive speech.
Painting has undergone several questionings in the recent decades; trends such as the French neofiguration, the German neo-expressionism or the Italian transvanguardia have explored the reassessment of this genre and have pushed it as far as possible from the conceptualization called “the return to painting”.
Moreover, the expansion of the pictorial genre -proposed by the minimalism and hyperrealism- has a critical approach to manufacturing; this attitude was very characteristic during the ’80s and ’90s in the international art scene. These latest artistic practices are part of a decentralization of manufactured compositional axis, from the claimed gesture trends (mentioned above). They tried to set aseptically an exhibition space, minimizing the handmade quality of works, in order to question the run out of hand, painting and space. This seems opposite to a very typical feature in the initial work of this trend occurred in the avant-garde (following the argument of F. Menna as analytical/constructive line). An example of this is the visible inaccuracy in the geometric constructions of Malevich and Mondrian´s paintings.
The works of Daniel Buren, Sol Le Witt and Michael Craig -Martin are examples of critical expansion of pictorial minimalism; they are artists who reworked immaterial fiction from reality, due to their own essential physical exposure. However, the debt with the handmade trade seems to be a question about some techno/mediation of art, typical from the ’70s, which ruled in favour of these artists.
The Chilean art scene has also inherited these tensions. The technological and monumental installations of Gonzalo Díaz, the constant shifting exercise in photography and printmaking developed by Eugenio Dittborn (2), or the most recent case of Camilo Yañez and his reflection about the landscape based on a formal re-understanding of painting and space largely exemplify this expansion in the Chilean context.
Moreover, a craft that crosses reflectively the techno/mediated body has also been working in our country. Nury González’s work has reflected at length on the documentary and mnemonic references on the symbolization of embroidery and patchwork lately, in the constitution of this relationship with the digital image. Regarding the latter, W. Thayer says: “The wool patchwork translates the digital patchwork, which translates it to binary codes, the analogical photography, which in turn translates technology or sunlight (photo). The content of technology is always another technology.” (3)
Also, Monica Bengoa´s delicate work has fragmented the constant of the image into multiple laborious processes, which have experienced various unconventional formats as using napkins or tinctured flowers.
Alejandra Rojas ‘s work generates a dialogue between these two aspects; the piece Raw Material is the result of a systematic work, which addresses experimentation with waste materiality, spatial processes for optical construction and a complement between pictorial expansions from minimalism with a craft act that activates the specific meaning of craftsmanship.
The tension of an intermediate point in this work relocates the object in a constructive and exploratory phase of art, observing her labour under the critical logic characterized by material obsession. Rojas kept it latent for five years.
II.
“Then, she spun non-stopping the great canvas during the day
and crumbled it overnight, putting torches beside me.
So, I cheated and persuaded the Achaeans for three years,
but when the fourth came and the seasons came with the months passing by
-and many days were spent -,
finally they caught me because of my slaves.
-Bitches who do not take care of me!- and they scolded me with their words.
So I had to finish the veil and not willingly, but by force.”
The Odyssey, Book XIX
I met Alejandra Rojas during 2004 while we were studying education at the Catholic University. During this training, Alejandra sat, taking her notes in classes and along with it, taking pieces of toilet paper and making thin strands with her fingers, then bringing them together and putting them into a bag. During that year, everybody who knew her started to help her in the rite. She accumulated hundreds of these paper threads, transforming the teacher training not only in learning art education, but also in a silent space of artistic creation.
The cumulus of wires represents the training step; each piece of paper carries a part of that knowledge and insights from that teaching vocation. Raw Material has an infinite net from waste fragments, which recodes this physicality in favour of a new optical dimension. Craft becomes a violent loom, where hundreds of wires (of variable thicknesses and shapes) create an optical effect that is condensed at the centre and is free on its edges. Thus, papers seem to come alive, attracted in their centre, perhaps seeking to join its physicality to stress the outcome of the tissue, releasing the symmetry towards to the end that is forced by the red background. The colour is tragically related to the use provided by the paper, an ironic and deeply aware act.
Fragmentation marks the beginning and the end of this piece. The figurative paintings Re-Production (Aralia and Orange) are dissected and arranged symmetrically in a separate/regular order. This fragmentation of the reference image –figurative- deploys the abstract proposal of Raw Material. The concern presented by these two works is a symbolic redefinition of a commemorative topic and the art history, two great tensions between modern and contemporary painting: figuration (iconic line) and abstraction (aniconic line). The model presented by Alejandra Rojas also builds the fragmentation gene from the Minimalist trends of the last century.
The building work Monochromes has a peculiarity, which is rooted in the sample name. The analytical and constructive art line has stated some disengagement with gesture and craft since its genesis. For Clement Greenberg, the American critic, Minimalism represented the consummation of reason mediating art, in which a mental process denied the gesture and expression exclusively. For Greenberg, -in defence of abstract expressionism- it was not identified as a pure art. Regarding this issue, Danto reports: “The practice of one kind of art was at the same time a criticism of that art itself, and it means removing from each part of the arts each and every one of the purposes intended as a loan from or through other arts. In this way, each art could be considered “pure”, and finds in that purity the guarantee of its qualities and independence. “Purity” means self-definition”.(4)
Alejandra Rojas claims the gesture and physicality in her work. Tensions arise from the use of such basic and precarious materials that model a hybrid space, an allegorical complexity typical of those who can reconcile their artistic job (purity) and teaching (self-definition).
Sebastián Vidal Valenzuela
November 2008
