“Nobody knows anybody. Not that well”
Miller’s Crossing, Joel y Ethan Coen, 1990
ANY RESEMBLANCE TO REAL STORIES OR CHARACTERS IS PURE COINCIDENCE
Phrases like this usually appear before the screening of a film, not so much to guide its interpretation, but to release the authors from legal responsibility.
In the spirit of such preliminary clarifications, on this occasion, I should state that:
The paintings in this exhibition are based on photographs of my installations.
The titles of the (fictional) films are not associated with the original concept of those works.
These oil paintings are, in fact, rather portraits of the creative process itself:
the act of making something new, telling a different story, painting one thing on top of another.
My work is not usually self-referential, nor do I (I think) believe that my work says much about my personal life.
But while preparing for LIMINAL (an anthological exhibition at MALBA, the most ambitious I have done in Argentina), I found myself thinking about adolescence and the broth in which I was formed.
The title of this show, Coming Soon, refers to the announcement that typically precedes a film screening, but it also evokes the closeness of something not yet realized—latent, approaching.
Adolescence is disordered and excessive, a kind of lava in which we flow.
If we are fortunate, we reach solid ground at some point after the heat of several epics, battles, and a dozen characters (our own and others’).
Mine took place among images, films, and oil paintings—the mediums in which I felt most fluent.
It was in the house in the neighborhood of Florida first, and Belgrano later, that I watched thousands of VHS movies, always surrounded by my father’s architecture.
These houses were the literal territory of my life, but the films staged their real landscape—like a set—inhabited by Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Alan Parker, Sam Peckinpah, Coppola, the Coen brothers, Antonioni, Chaplin, Visconti, Fritz Lang.
Inside cinema, there was no limit—only experience—I immersed myself as soon as I returned from school.
In the 1980s, video rental stores began to open in Buenos Aires.
I remember standing before the VHS cases lined up on tall shelves: my eyes scanned the covers and titles for long stretches of time.
It was a small place that both promised and frustrated—an ideal corner to be alone yet accompanied.
The covers anticipated stories that later unfolded on the screen. And yet, these images—like posters—ignited imagination and curiosity in the attempt to foresee the narrative.
It was also in a video store, at age 13 or 14, that I believed myself on the verge of a great discovery (a bit like Tim Robbins with his hula-hoop in The Hudsucker Proxy) and I started my own mini-business by launching a delivery service for the neighborhood video rental.
“You don’t need to pay me,” I told the owners, “the tips will be enough.”
I pedaled all over Florida with VHS tapes in my backpack, but before long, others had the same idea—except they included the cost of delivery in the rental price—and my tips grew smaller.
Finally, a minor bicycle accident led my parents to forbid me from continuing.
So I returned to the hypnotic spiral of watching and learning.
The Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy has said that his art school was not the academy but the beach.
Mine was the VCR.
When I wasn’t watching films, I painted in oil.
I took that activity very seriously, I loved it, and I believed I would dedicate my life to painting.
At fifteen, I considered myself a professional artist—and specifically, a painter.
Today, I am a bit embarrassed remembering the art I made and my ideas about it, just as adolescence itself is embarrassing—feverish and explosive.
But my paintings—mostly lost or hidden—were another broth, another lava in which I moved and experimented.
In Other Inquisitions, Borges explores the work inspired by another:
“Each writer creates his precursors. His labor alters our conception of the past, as it will alter the future.”
In that sense, I was amused by the idea of being inspired by myself as if I were someone else.
And it is that, whether we like it or not, time takes care of turning us into another, and, in the end, in a single life we become a multitude.
So, since among all these characters there will always be another—could I not also be my own precursor?
Just as my family moved from Florida to Belgrano, the DVD arrived—with its slim and elegant cases—pushing aside the clumsy VHS tapes and their plastic reels into oblivion.
Video stores began to get rid of them, and my father, a great cinephile, began to buy them, eventually forming a personal videotheque of more than a thousand titles.
Coming Soon offers a small replica of our collection—the one that nourished my solitude for years.
When I began developing this exhibition, my father confessed that he had thrown the entire collection away a few days earlier.
“Well, yes,” he told me, “I got tired and I ordered a dumpster.”
More than a thousand films in the trash.
Only in cinema could destruction and preservation cross paths so closely.
Leandro.
June 2019
