“The Champion of Ghosts” The new exhibition by Fabio Kacero, curated by Francisco Garamona, takes over both rooms of Ruth Benzacar Galería de Arte and questions aspects of personality, trace, and disappearance.
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EL CAMPEÓN DE LOS FANTASMAS [THE CHAMPION OF GHOSTS]
Francisco Garamona
This exhibition by Fabio Kacero could probably be seen — referring to the famous phrase by von Clausewitz — as the continuation, by other means, of the artist’s last published book, Antología del sueño argentino (Anthology of the Argentine Dream), released a year ago.
In that book, an imaginary dream is told — like all the dreams in it — in which a young man finds himself at the entrance of an art auction house. The security guard gives him the thick auction catalog and tells him that the most expensive painting in the world has just been sold, then asks if he knows whose it is. The young man flips through the pages of the catalog trying to answer, but what he sees are not artworks or artists’ names — only signatures filling each page, which are themselves signed again in the lower right corner.
(The young man cannot answer which is the most expensive painting in history, but we, following the logic of Capitalism, could say: the next one.)
The story imagined by Kacero the writer inspires Kacero the visual artist, who plunges his arm into fiction, tears out the pages of that imaginary catalog, and turns them into the real sheets we can now see framed and hanging in the gallery.
Be that as it may, beyond the question of precedence between the writer and the visual artist, I believe that focusing his eye on something like the signature shows both precision and subtlety — two very “Kacerean” skills.
An old profaner of other people’s calligraphies (as if to absorb alien powers), and now of signatures, Kacero always seems to proceed with that same sharpness of aim and clarity of choice that makes his works self-sufficient — never needing, like so much contemporary art, a prior explanation to justify or sustain them.
I think of works as diverse as nemebiax, el muertito, las nieves indoors, the MoMA–Tate signs, the Índices, the video of his personal credits, or Earlater, the journey through time. (And the same could be said of his processes — guided by simple principles that often trigger endless developments, as in the paradigmatic case of the combinatorial art of nemebiax, where the simplicity of the means coexists with the excess of its results. This is perfectly summed up in Kacero’s own formula: “the infinitely possible in the form of the infinitely combinable.”)
But what is a signature?
That automatic scribble in which identity is encoded; that almost unconscious drawing that, like a Midas of appropriation, takes possession of everything it touches.
How does that mechanism of ownership work? And, in turn, who signs the signature, or who legitimizes it? Is there a greater signature above all great signatures, and a smaller one beneath all small ones? Does the one who signs last sign best?
There is no room here to unfold all the questions (and possible answers) these signed signatures raise, and Fabio, with a sly smile, simply describes them as:
drawings made in collaboration with living and dead artists.
Upon entering the gallery’s second room, we find a solitary, enigmatic pink monochrome that, after reading the accompanying short story (El monocromo del molinero — The Miller’s Monochrome), reveals itself as something that emerged from that very story.
That is to say, it’s a gesture similar to the previous one — a displacement between improbable realities and fictions — although more deliberate.
When you read the story, you’ll discover that the monochrome was painted by a 17th-century miller — something impossible for that time, or, rather, entirely possible, except that the impossibility would lie in considering, in that century, a single-colored canvas as a painting, a work of art.
What is possible to see in a given era?
What is an object if it lacks a world to name it, or even to see it?
These are clues in a story that is also not foreign to the question of authorship — and therefore of the signature — since it also leads us to ask:
Who should sign that monochrome materialized from fiction? Fabio Kacero himself? The 17th-century miller, the story’s protagonist? Or the spirits who, as the story tells, guided his hand in painting it?
(In the room of signatures we find Madge Gill, an English artist who signed her drawings with the name of the spirit that possessed her.)
Or should all three sign? Or no one?
As is in fact the case with the monochrome: no one.
A signature that denies itself — and that, with a touch of Macedonian humor, Nobody wants to use.
And if the first two rooms are populated with ghostly presences, so is the third, where the video Dear friends… is shown.
A TV newscast composed of many names and a single piece of news.
The number of names that can appear in this kind of news (the death of a person) is limited — and that limit forms one of the possible links between signatures and names, which are obviously connected: fame.
Even though Kacero sought exceptions to the rule of fame — and I can attest, tirelessly — among those chosen to appear in his video.
Beyond being a remarkable exercise in observing a genre and its conventions, Dear friends… immediately brings to mind the artist’s own earlier works — those early 1990s quilts that resembled tombstones (even with their strangely shiny, packaging-like appearance), bearing inscriptions, in decals, of names and birth and death dates.
And to close this portrait, I return to the beginning — to Antología del sueño argentino and its connection to the show — since The Champion of Ghosts, the exhibition’s title, is taken literally from the book.
And Kacero, shepherd of specters, uses it there to name something quite specific.
What thing, you may ask?
And now I’m the sly one — his editor, and his curator on this occasion — who says that to uncover that mystery, you’ll have to read the book.
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CLARIFICATION
Fabio Kacero
The signatures of living artists, critics, curators, and gallerists included in this exhibition are, for the most part, signatures I personally collected.
I make this simple clarification to point out that obtaining these signatures depended mainly on chance circumstances (a meeting at an opening, for example, where, after briefly explaining my intentions, I provided the person with a marker and a sheet of paper), and therefore, that the signatures shown here are only those I was able to obtain, and do not constitute a selective compilation of names from the local art scene.
The possibility of presenting a more or less complete panorama of our milieu was beyond my reach.
I also clarify that it was not possible, on this occasion, to display all of the signatures collected. Surely there will be another opportunity in the future to do so.
If anyone who signed does not find their signature included in the exhibition, I apologize.
As for the signatures of deceased artists, although it may seem that — unlike the previous case — I was guided by a more selective or personal criterion, I must say first that not all the spirits summoned to sign agreed to my requests, while others, on the contrary, signed without explicit invitation.
Secondly, I shared part of the selection of artists from the beyond with the exhibition’s curator, which led me — in attempting to accommodate his suggestions, some even from the 19th century — to push my mediumistic abilities to the limit.
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LIST OF SIGNATURES
Organized from right to left
Right wall
Florine Stettheimer
Henry Darger
César Aira
Isidore Ducasse
Alberto Goldenstein
Rosario Bléfari
Josefina Ayerza
Germaine Derbecq
Gilbert & George
Joseph Cornell
L. S. Lowry
Verónica Flom
Robert Crumb
Nicole Moises
Florencio Molina Campos
Benito Laren
Óscar Domínguez
George Herriman
Carlos Huffmann
Chiachio & Giannone
Karin Schneider
Jorge Gumier Maier
Bruno Dubner
Roberto Matta
Maia Güemes
Juliana Lafitte
Sergio De Loff
Emeterio Cerro
Lucrecia Palacios
Agustín Pérez Rubio
Myrninerest (Madge Gill)
Vertical works
Osamu Tezuka
Julio Grinblatt
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
Héctor Viel Temperley
Camila Charask
Juan Forn
Mark Rothko
Double row, top line
Patricia Rizzo
Jean Dubuffet
Wilfredo Lam
Mónica Girón
Sebastián Gordín
Pier Cantamessa
Rodolfo Fogwill
R. Mutt
Silvia Gurfein
Vilhelm Hammershøi
Carlos Herrera
Marcelo Brodsky
Double row, bottom line
Fernanda Laguna
Gustavo Mosteiro
Pablo Picasso
Inés Katzenstein
Raúl Flores
Daniela Iramain
Augustin Lesage
Herminda Lahitte
Alejandro Correa
Victoria Colmegna
Juan Pablo Correa
Graciela Hasper
Triple row, first line
Nicolás Moguilevsky
Oski (Oscar Conti)
Charles Addams
Dora Maar
Paola Vega
Fabián Burgos
Capi
Jimena Ferreiro
Kazimir Malevich
Vicente Grondona
Triple row, second line
Lux Lindner
William Edmonson
Grace Pailthorpe
Charles Schulz
Amalia Amodeo
Yoko Ono
Nicolás Guagnini
Hilma af Klint
Alejo Ponce de León
Arthur Dove
Triple row, third line
Florencia Munetatto
Luis Benedit
Nicola Constantino
Alberto Savinio
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Gustavo Bruzzone
Cándido López
Karina Peisajovich
Alberto Greco
Ernesto Ballesteros
Back wall
Triple row, first line
Claudio Golonbek
Milton Caniff
María Gainza
Cedric Morris
André Kertész
Anatole Saderman
Charlotte Salomon
Cristina Schiavi
Marina De Caro
Carlos Calvaresi
Man Ray
J. J. Grandville
Marta Minujín
Triple row, second line
Marcolina Di Pierro
Raúl Soldi
Louis Wain
Yves Klein
Mariette Lydis
Georgia O’Keeffe
Ana María Battistozzi
Jorge de la Vega
Saul Steinberg
Agustina Picasso
Mirtha Dermisache
Adriana Rosenberg
Giorgio de Chirico
Triple row, third line
Francis Picabia
Jean Cocteau
Silvina Pirraglia
Rómulo Macció
Santiago Villanueva
Gertrude Stein
Lara Marmor
Alberto Giacometti
Raúl Naón
Elba Bairon
Alfredo Hlito
Marie Laurencin
Natalia Rosa Cristo Pan
Left wall
Double row, first line
Víctor Cúnsolo
Martín Di Girolamo
Violeta Parra
Sergio Bizzio
Andy Warhol
Gwen John
Yente (Eugenia Crenovich)
Blinky Palermo
Laura Batkis
Alfred Kubin
Leonora Carrington
Tarsila do Amaral
Salvador Dalí
Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski)
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Philip Guston
María Laura Schiavoni
Double row, second line
Silvina Ocampo
Juan Batlle Planas
Bruno Schulz
Mora Bacal
Matías Serra Bradford
Barry Flanagan
Luis Felipe Noé
Miguel Harte
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Landrú (Juan Carlos Colombres)
Peter Blake
Bodys Isek Kingelez
Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos
Liliana Maresca
Unidentified
Osvaldo Baigorria
José Luis Menghi
Single row
Xul Solar
Rafael Cippolini
Guillermo Iuso
Lee Krasner
Marcela Sinclair
Sol LeWitt
Federico Klemm
Max Gómez Canle
Dante Quinterno
Diego Fontanet
Ben Vautier
Remedios Varo
Henri Rousseau
John Ashbery
Copi (Raúl Damonte Botana)
Raquel Forner
Marcelo Alzetta
