'FRAGMENTS: Notes on a seismic fault-line' by Richard Salmon
FRAGMENTS: Notes on a seismic fault-line
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo MAC, Santiago, 2016
by Richard Salmon
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo MAC, Santiago, 2016
by Richard Salmon
The emergence, and the intent, of conceptual Art has equally taught us new ways of understanding and interpreting art. Ignacio Valdes is not a conceptual artist. Indeed he is in many ways an artist in the grand tradition. This has not stopped him from culling, 'stealing', in Picasso's phrase, from all that he has observed in a life of profound perceiving and fast, resolute, making.
Valdes and his family, having spent 16 years based in London, returned to Chile in 2012.
On 27 February 2010 the fifth largest earthquake ever technically recorded devastated the country, over 700 km north to south, from Peru to Concepción. That, and the tsunami, which reached San Diego in California, killed 500 people. And must have permanently changed the outlook of many people in that country, a country rich in architects, and in the personalities, idiosyncrasies and shibboleths of its artists.
Looking, closely, at his new series of work, the emotional impact of this event reverberates onward. Ignacio has encapsulated the 'state of catastrophe', declared that day throughout the country, and made something out of it, something that lingers in the mind, something also of great emotional impact, transferred to the mind of the gallery visitor. I speak of a series, a large group, of small wood sculptures fashioned out of the mostly wooden detritus of a house half-destroyed by the 2010 earthquake. I speak, as well, of eighty-two specific small sculptures individually. Both: the group itself; and its component parts -the 'individuals' which make up the corps humain of the whole- are a creation of landmark proportions in the story of Chilean art. This corpus dives deep into the human condition, birth and death, destruction and re-formation. Even redemption: these individuals can be full of joy, despite their terrible conception. It is sometimes the story of us all. It has always to be the story of the artist who made them.
Work, momenti mori, objets de grand luxe for the private drawing room, or the mahogany boardroom atop a skyscraper. Important sculpture, but difficult:-they translate the deliberate intentions and the emotions, conscious or not, of the artist who made them.
The earthquake reached the Valdes country place, Cunaco, in the mediterranean south, shared now by several different strands and generations of the artist's family, and great damage was caused. Parts of the front of the house collapsed, its glorious glazed verandah, filled with both an intensity of religious relics, terra-cotta busts of the Redeemer, marble for Mary; and smart Second Empire parisian furniture, coffee tables, cigarette boxes and ash-trays, all of it almost certainly gone. And the half-Scandinavian, half-Latin, drawing room, kept as it had been in the 1880's, was entirely destroyed. The house resembles, or resembled, in its strategically modest tone of rustic grandeur, an imperially-gifted russian dacha of medium size of the Tolstoyan Movement that might have been erected somewhere in the Ukraine under Alexander ll : pink, blue, yellow and white; wooden in parts, with stables, a circular carriage-drive from which a monkeypuzzle-tree-lined avenue leads to the country road outside, beyond high iron gates, reached through an arboretum. Its interior had been left almost exactly as it had been arranged and decorated when the house was in its heyday, and formed an enormously rich picture of secular country life at the time of the grandfather or great-grandfather of the artist. A home to an eminent 'Victorian' (I am writing this in London), a rare and important museum, of a kind, in its own right.
Squeezed between the great north-south spine of the Andes and the Pacific Ocean, as is the entire bacon-slice of Chile itself, this house speaks of somewhere 'long ago and far away'; a land of make-believe, or perhaps of what is called the former land of Cockaigne; a place where miracles can quite expectedly and decorously occur; where the rules of Nature are held to be the eternal liturgy of life.
In the 2015 construction of the subway in San Franciso, archeologists from the Sonoma State University discovered a stratum of history: that slice of the pre-1906 earthquake which was the city's Chinatown, with all its broken pottery and sewing machines, and artefacts of daily life, led by one of the world's most ancient people in arguably the world's most advanced society. The significance of this opulent and decaying mansion, whose wine-producing farmland originally stretched about it for miles in all directions, has in a sense been discovered by an earthquake. A Kingdom of Outre-Mer, a grand symbol of past achievements and past battles won, that now lies prostate to those who seek to rebuild it.
"Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears, amid the alien corn:
The same that oft-times hath .......
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn. ***
If not entirely destroyed, Cunaco will not be the same. And its story will mingle with the creation presentation of these new artefacts: objects which are not about the past, but about what can be done with the future. While the story of his house may hold the secret of his practice as an artist, and possibly even be the cause of it, Ignacio's work will not be the same, either, since the earthquake.
Everything about it spoke of survival through political and social turmoil; of still, country ways, a kind of family solidarity; and a certain way of life.
A way of life rejected by the artist himself, through the route of a personal involvement of [ 20 ] years immersion in the 'cutting-edge' art movements, in the UK, post the 'modern British' period and towards conceptual art, and the backlash there, now, towards representation, witnessed first-hand by Valdes. As seen, too, by him, in the US, post the heroic New York expressionist period: the 'coming of age' of abstraction, and the embracing of video art and art based on new technologies. Valdes is the consummate exhibition, museum and gallery visitor. He has absorbed a vast amount of information about the transmission of making new works of art. Once all of that is rejected, too, he gets down to work.
After leaving the Slade School in London, early, he made, and continues to develop, a story about the human condition in another medium: painting. Using ravishing sets for the humanity he portrays: scarlets, yellows, greens and blues, the viewer in confronted with figures, usually alone, which speak of a self-conscious re-balancing of their own prospects when compared with the size and wonderment of Nature herself. Individuals who are barely perceptible, frequently, in their progress over the canvas, or in the trudge across the span of a life-time, their repetitious poses reminiscent of the reality of lives of pre-ordained existence. Valdes' figures do not spring out of the canvas at you: they cower or pass by with a shadowy presence within the body of colour that surrounds them. This is work about the reality of our purpose: that of existence itself. Where an artist like Bacon (the two artists' paintings bear a superficial resemblance) plunges into the predicament of the depicted figures, and the tragic results of their choices, on a personal and individual basis; Valdes' figures do not fight their fate, but allow the very molecules of which their corporeal presences consist to walk past the viewer, back into the picture space, towards and away from it. From there, nothing is to be done about the predicament of these figures which the artist would possibly be innocent enough to think he could alter.
So it is with the 'individual' who inhabits one of the new post-catastrophe sculpted works in this exhibition. For the sculpture is anthropomorphic, though frequently abstract seeming. For this reason it demands intense contemplation. Out of the wood, comes the man. The detritus of a far-away, dreaming house, pulled apart by the splitting by Nature of the rock on which it has been built.
These are constructs which bear the traits of human emotion, neither exploited nor overly dwelt-upon by their maker. Like his paintings, they only offer clues about the inevitabilty of the life-cycle, and this stasis, this fine-line, this razor's edge which the artist is telling us about, and this is where the greatness of Valdes 'secretly' or 'modestly' held painterly and sculptural gifts hide. To be commentator, and observer, during the passionate and probably agonizing act of creating these works, is asking of any artist almost more than she or he could possibly physically or mentally cope with. For the artist to maintain such control in work which is attempting to be, at once, a part of a story, but also the story itself, (the individual and the group) there is strength and focus, purpose and ingenuity, determination and inspiration, all combined.
For all is known in the knowing of the person of the artist. Any transference of the personality of the artist into paint in his paintings or form in his sculptures is made clear to the viewer. It can be spoken of from either side: knowing the artist, or knowing the work. In this, Valdes has maintained a cordon sanitaire around his sources. He would deny that these remarkable works tell his story, as much as I believe he would deny that a complete intellectual penetration of all eighty-two works would explain him to us. This alchemy, which is a principal aspect of the sculptures and paintings of Ignacio Valdes, I spoke of, above, when I tried to separate the greatness of the artist from the greatness of the work: that hinterland where the perception of the viewer mixes with the intent, or purpose, of the artist.
This exhibition is about an artist who has come into his own space and is not concerned about how that space is judged.
Let us briefly look at the work of two women: Louise Bourgeois, whose story it is necessary to understand in order to experience her work. It was the affaire between her Father and her nanny which concentrated her response to the world. Her work may, then, be about the anger towards the male, and the conflicting sense of dependency upon him. This work becomes immediately recognizable, idiosyncratic, as difficult and as wonderful as the individual who made it. The meaning and 'importance' of whose work was only universally understood once she had reached old-age.
And Phyllida Barlow, the British sculptor, now 71 years old. Barlow taught sculpture to a whole new wave of now highly recognized sculptors at the Slade during a long career, only to become a universally acknowledged artist in her own right in the past five or ten years. Using low-grade materials, cement, plywood, or cardboard, she constructs sometimes huge and apparently unstable work which 'constantly reinvestigates the possibilities of form, mass and volume'. Directly descended from Charles Darwin, her story is, curiously, about evolution. The evolution of materials permitted for an artist to manipulate. Evolution of the individual to international recognition.
In returning to a ruined house, and helping to restore it, Ignacio Valdes has allowed his own story to emerge.
In taking his material, in this heroic new series of work, from the very fabric of that house, he has reached a point of personal liberation which may allow for explanations, which in the post-conceptual world from which art is currently emerging, has inevitably to be included in the mind of the viewer when deciding on the impact and significance of the work.
When I first saw images of this work, I read them as an essay in alchemy; one work standing for this transference as much as any other; the ancient mind of Nature, and the spontaneous processes of Conceptual art generating this alchemy.
The mixing of these two ingredients, the single work and single group of work, came to be seen as a story of Chile by a Chilean of hidden brilliance.
Does this exhibition mark the start of an historical analysis- a time of redemptive and psychological explanation, relating to the art of Ignacio Valdes?
***John Keats (1795-1821) From Ode to a Nightingale 1819
© RICHARD SALMON
London, May 2016
Valdes and his family, having spent 16 years based in London, returned to Chile in 2012.
On 27 February 2010 the fifth largest earthquake ever technically recorded devastated the country, over 700 km north to south, from Peru to Concepción. That, and the tsunami, which reached San Diego in California, killed 500 people. And must have permanently changed the outlook of many people in that country, a country rich in architects, and in the personalities, idiosyncrasies and shibboleths of its artists.
Looking, closely, at his new series of work, the emotional impact of this event reverberates onward. Ignacio has encapsulated the 'state of catastrophe', declared that day throughout the country, and made something out of it, something that lingers in the mind, something also of great emotional impact, transferred to the mind of the gallery visitor. I speak of a series, a large group, of small wood sculptures fashioned out of the mostly wooden detritus of a house half-destroyed by the 2010 earthquake. I speak, as well, of eighty-two specific small sculptures individually. Both: the group itself; and its component parts -the 'individuals' which make up the corps humain of the whole- are a creation of landmark proportions in the story of Chilean art. This corpus dives deep into the human condition, birth and death, destruction and re-formation. Even redemption: these individuals can be full of joy, despite their terrible conception. It is sometimes the story of us all. It has always to be the story of the artist who made them.
Work, momenti mori, objets de grand luxe for the private drawing room, or the mahogany boardroom atop a skyscraper. Important sculpture, but difficult:-they translate the deliberate intentions and the emotions, conscious or not, of the artist who made them.
The earthquake reached the Valdes country place, Cunaco, in the mediterranean south, shared now by several different strands and generations of the artist's family, and great damage was caused. Parts of the front of the house collapsed, its glorious glazed verandah, filled with both an intensity of religious relics, terra-cotta busts of the Redeemer, marble for Mary; and smart Second Empire parisian furniture, coffee tables, cigarette boxes and ash-trays, all of it almost certainly gone. And the half-Scandinavian, half-Latin, drawing room, kept as it had been in the 1880's, was entirely destroyed. The house resembles, or resembled, in its strategically modest tone of rustic grandeur, an imperially-gifted russian dacha of medium size of the Tolstoyan Movement that might have been erected somewhere in the Ukraine under Alexander ll : pink, blue, yellow and white; wooden in parts, with stables, a circular carriage-drive from which a monkeypuzzle-tree-lined avenue leads to the country road outside, beyond high iron gates, reached through an arboretum. Its interior had been left almost exactly as it had been arranged and decorated when the house was in its heyday, and formed an enormously rich picture of secular country life at the time of the grandfather or great-grandfather of the artist. A home to an eminent 'Victorian' (I am writing this in London), a rare and important museum, of a kind, in its own right.
Squeezed between the great north-south spine of the Andes and the Pacific Ocean, as is the entire bacon-slice of Chile itself, this house speaks of somewhere 'long ago and far away'; a land of make-believe, or perhaps of what is called the former land of Cockaigne; a place where miracles can quite expectedly and decorously occur; where the rules of Nature are held to be the eternal liturgy of life.
In the 2015 construction of the subway in San Franciso, archeologists from the Sonoma State University discovered a stratum of history: that slice of the pre-1906 earthquake which was the city's Chinatown, with all its broken pottery and sewing machines, and artefacts of daily life, led by one of the world's most ancient people in arguably the world's most advanced society. The significance of this opulent and decaying mansion, whose wine-producing farmland originally stretched about it for miles in all directions, has in a sense been discovered by an earthquake. A Kingdom of Outre-Mer, a grand symbol of past achievements and past battles won, that now lies prostate to those who seek to rebuild it.
"Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears, amid the alien corn:
The same that oft-times hath .......
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn. ***
If not entirely destroyed, Cunaco will not be the same. And its story will mingle with the creation presentation of these new artefacts: objects which are not about the past, but about what can be done with the future. While the story of his house may hold the secret of his practice as an artist, and possibly even be the cause of it, Ignacio's work will not be the same, either, since the earthquake.
Everything about it spoke of survival through political and social turmoil; of still, country ways, a kind of family solidarity; and a certain way of life.
A way of life rejected by the artist himself, through the route of a personal involvement of [ 20 ] years immersion in the 'cutting-edge' art movements, in the UK, post the 'modern British' period and towards conceptual art, and the backlash there, now, towards representation, witnessed first-hand by Valdes. As seen, too, by him, in the US, post the heroic New York expressionist period: the 'coming of age' of abstraction, and the embracing of video art and art based on new technologies. Valdes is the consummate exhibition, museum and gallery visitor. He has absorbed a vast amount of information about the transmission of making new works of art. Once all of that is rejected, too, he gets down to work.
After leaving the Slade School in London, early, he made, and continues to develop, a story about the human condition in another medium: painting. Using ravishing sets for the humanity he portrays: scarlets, yellows, greens and blues, the viewer in confronted with figures, usually alone, which speak of a self-conscious re-balancing of their own prospects when compared with the size and wonderment of Nature herself. Individuals who are barely perceptible, frequently, in their progress over the canvas, or in the trudge across the span of a life-time, their repetitious poses reminiscent of the reality of lives of pre-ordained existence. Valdes' figures do not spring out of the canvas at you: they cower or pass by with a shadowy presence within the body of colour that surrounds them. This is work about the reality of our purpose: that of existence itself. Where an artist like Bacon (the two artists' paintings bear a superficial resemblance) plunges into the predicament of the depicted figures, and the tragic results of their choices, on a personal and individual basis; Valdes' figures do not fight their fate, but allow the very molecules of which their corporeal presences consist to walk past the viewer, back into the picture space, towards and away from it. From there, nothing is to be done about the predicament of these figures which the artist would possibly be innocent enough to think he could alter.
So it is with the 'individual' who inhabits one of the new post-catastrophe sculpted works in this exhibition. For the sculpture is anthropomorphic, though frequently abstract seeming. For this reason it demands intense contemplation. Out of the wood, comes the man. The detritus of a far-away, dreaming house, pulled apart by the splitting by Nature of the rock on which it has been built.
These are constructs which bear the traits of human emotion, neither exploited nor overly dwelt-upon by their maker. Like his paintings, they only offer clues about the inevitabilty of the life-cycle, and this stasis, this fine-line, this razor's edge which the artist is telling us about, and this is where the greatness of Valdes 'secretly' or 'modestly' held painterly and sculptural gifts hide. To be commentator, and observer, during the passionate and probably agonizing act of creating these works, is asking of any artist almost more than she or he could possibly physically or mentally cope with. For the artist to maintain such control in work which is attempting to be, at once, a part of a story, but also the story itself, (the individual and the group) there is strength and focus, purpose and ingenuity, determination and inspiration, all combined.
For all is known in the knowing of the person of the artist. Any transference of the personality of the artist into paint in his paintings or form in his sculptures is made clear to the viewer. It can be spoken of from either side: knowing the artist, or knowing the work. In this, Valdes has maintained a cordon sanitaire around his sources. He would deny that these remarkable works tell his story, as much as I believe he would deny that a complete intellectual penetration of all eighty-two works would explain him to us. This alchemy, which is a principal aspect of the sculptures and paintings of Ignacio Valdes, I spoke of, above, when I tried to separate the greatness of the artist from the greatness of the work: that hinterland where the perception of the viewer mixes with the intent, or purpose, of the artist.
This exhibition is about an artist who has come into his own space and is not concerned about how that space is judged.
Let us briefly look at the work of two women: Louise Bourgeois, whose story it is necessary to understand in order to experience her work. It was the affaire between her Father and her nanny which concentrated her response to the world. Her work may, then, be about the anger towards the male, and the conflicting sense of dependency upon him. This work becomes immediately recognizable, idiosyncratic, as difficult and as wonderful as the individual who made it. The meaning and 'importance' of whose work was only universally understood once she had reached old-age.
And Phyllida Barlow, the British sculptor, now 71 years old. Barlow taught sculpture to a whole new wave of now highly recognized sculptors at the Slade during a long career, only to become a universally acknowledged artist in her own right in the past five or ten years. Using low-grade materials, cement, plywood, or cardboard, she constructs sometimes huge and apparently unstable work which 'constantly reinvestigates the possibilities of form, mass and volume'. Directly descended from Charles Darwin, her story is, curiously, about evolution. The evolution of materials permitted for an artist to manipulate. Evolution of the individual to international recognition.
In returning to a ruined house, and helping to restore it, Ignacio Valdes has allowed his own story to emerge.
In taking his material, in this heroic new series of work, from the very fabric of that house, he has reached a point of personal liberation which may allow for explanations, which in the post-conceptual world from which art is currently emerging, has inevitably to be included in the mind of the viewer when deciding on the impact and significance of the work.
When I first saw images of this work, I read them as an essay in alchemy; one work standing for this transference as much as any other; the ancient mind of Nature, and the spontaneous processes of Conceptual art generating this alchemy.
The mixing of these two ingredients, the single work and single group of work, came to be seen as a story of Chile by a Chilean of hidden brilliance.
Does this exhibition mark the start of an historical analysis- a time of redemptive and psychological explanation, relating to the art of Ignacio Valdes?
***John Keats (1795-1821) From Ode to a Nightingale 1819
© RICHARD SALMON
London, May 2016