La Patria extraña; camuflaje y fantasmagoría en la imagen pictórica.
http://museodelaciudadqro.org/
Del 24 de octubre al 6 de diciembre.
Blanca Gutiérrez Galindo, PhD
FAD/UNAM
Estranged Fatherland: Camouflage and Phantasmagoria in Pictorial Representation
After the confrontation between abstraction and figuration and between high and low culture which characterized artistic practice during the 20th century --especially during the Cold War 1947-1989-- artists are currently finding themselves in a situation of renewed freedom. This new situation coincides with a descent from the pedestal in which modernity had placed painting, considering it the artistic discipline par excellence. Today painting is being used as an instrument for significance that avoids its esoteric condition, to place itself in a world of quotidian culture, populated by the signs of visual and design culture. In many ways, this has lead to [the fact] that painting now enjoys an experimental condition in which the notion of painting itself is constantly being redefined.
The paintings that Christian Santana Prinz’s presents in the exhibition “Estranged Fatherland: Camouflage and Phantasmagoria in Pictorial Representation” are a contemplation regarding the kind of image that is produced in a painting and the manners in which one sees the world, stimulated and provoked by the images presented. The exhibition is divided into two parts. In the first, titled “City and Environment”, the paintings refer to the signs of industrial design in the field of transportation and communication--bridges, cement and steel structures, highways-, which create a hallucinatory vision of a utopic world where the impossible union between civilization and nature exists. In these paintings, urban territories are the place where the subjective experience of what is public is renewed in the exaltation of color and perspectives. On the other hand, in the second part, “Cryptic Landscapes”, the painter shows us fragments of woods as natural universes where rituals and the symbolism of myths of varying origin mingle with the imaginaries of industrial culture. Among this coming and going between apparently contradictory universes, the weft of “Estranged Fatherland” is woven, a sample of that which calls our attention to the real meaning of looking, and especially, looking at a painting.
After the confrontation between abstraction and figuration and between high and low culture which characterized artistic practice during the 20th century --especially during the Cold War 1947-1989-- artists are currently finding themselves in a situation of renewed freedom. This new situation coincides with a descent from the pedestal in which modernity had placed painting, considering it the artistic discipline par excellence. Today painting is being used as an instrument for significance that avoids its esoteric condition, to place itself in a world of quotidian culture, populated by the signs of visual and design culture. In many ways, this has lead to [the fact] that painting now enjoys an experimental condition in which the notion of painting itself is constantly being redefined.
The paintings that Christian Santana Prinz’s presents in the exhibition “Estranged Fatherland: Camouflage and Phantasmagoria in Pictorial Representation” are a contemplation regarding the kind of image that is produced in a painting and the manners in which one sees the world, stimulated and provoked by the images presented. The exhibition is divided into two parts. In the first, titled “City and Environment”, the paintings refer to the signs of industrial design in the field of transportation and communication--bridges, cement and steel structures, highways-, which create a hallucinatory vision of a utopic world where the impossible union between civilization and nature exists. In these paintings, urban territories are the place where the subjective experience of what is public is renewed in the exaltation of color and perspectives. On the other hand, in the second part, “Cryptic Landscapes”, the painter shows us fragments of woods as natural universes where rituals and the symbolism of myths of varying origin mingle with the imaginaries of industrial culture. Among this coming and going between apparently contradictory universes, the weft of “Estranged Fatherland” is woven, a sample of that which calls our attention to the real meaning of looking, and especially, looking at a painting.
Blanca Gutiérrez Galindo, PhD
FAD/UNAM