OPA- Oficina Para Proyectos de Arte,
Jul 15, 2005 - Sep 16, 2005
Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico
Detonantes (Detonatings)
by Lorena Peña
The discourses and dissertations that the contemporary art system gives rise to at its events are so numerous, so elaborate and so well contained that it is difficult to avoid being grateful when a pair of curators, from a risky, if bold, standpoint, take the liberty of opening an extraordinary dialogue that is simple, unpresumptuous and unconventional. Last July 15th, the Art Projects Office inaugurated the Detonantes (Detonatings) exhibition, under the curatorship of Guillermo Santamarina and Inaki Bonillas. This collection is nothing less than a remarkable presentation of 25 incipient works; that is, 25 objects that vacillate between being a piece and an experiment, and that, in a given moment of their existence, give way to the formal and conceptually-resolved realization of subsequent pieces. Maurycy Gomulicki’s collection of Polish rattles, the photographic archive compiled by the grandfather of artist, Inaki Bonillas, and the assortment of objects arranged on refrigerators of Gabriela Galvan, are displayed apparently piled up into a kind of "idea tianguis"(1); made up of objects of every imaginable shape and size, to which the spectator responds in search of a form, image or evocation of which to take possession. Each of the works comprising this exhibition maintains itself almost in a whispered, seductive monologue. The tarot, designed by Amorales himself so that the audience were seated to create their own and unlimited interpretation of the life of another, the caribocas (drawings on lipstick marks) that Raul Ibanez’s mother drew on her notebooks, and Teresa Margolles’ latex casts, exert their own treatise upon the exercise of making judgments about life and human activity, at the same time as Marco Arce’s mural rises up in a reflection upon painting in a subdued and impotent discourse. Although the art system has sheltered works and theories, evaluated them, sold them time and again, and even lost and recovered a few, the creative process of their authors, the exact moment ideas are given life, is that intangible that will always be the mysteriously romantic seducer within art. Despite the fact that Art History has painstakingly unraveled these processes, demystifying and even commodifying them, there exists a part of this process that will never be reached and that will continue adding to an endless frustration: that we will never be able to penetrate someone else’s thoughts. Santamarina, far from such pretension, appears to opt for resignation and, by way of exchange, to construct a kind of snapshot that freezes the instant in which a work may or may not come into being, the moment just as the artist - now not an illuminated being but an ordinary, thinking, strangely creative human - arrives at the oblique idea that impels him, that obsessive game that deals with only that, playing at seeking/inventing hidden things.
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