“There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colorless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it”. (Arthur Conan Doyle)
One. The art of installation
Some time ago, we beautiful souls decreed that the most powerful hit in the long list of spectacles offered by the museum industry in Europe is not at the Louvre, nor at the Pompidou, nor on Berlin’s Museum Island, but in the Prado. I am referring to Goya’s Black Paintings, that necklace of oils in which witches, gossiping old women, demons and dogs on the verge of drowning coexist. The effect of that series cannot be located in any individual painting, but rather in the ambient noise emitted by their coexistence in space; a dark, shadowy hum that comes from a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Black magic. Or, to be more prosaic: the highest point of installation art, two centuries before the term named what it names today.
In tune with the first modern painter, Valentina offers us in this exhibition her scarlet paintings. And, like Goya, she produces an installation without the need for sound tricks, LED screens or investment in furniture. The enchantment results from the careful arrangement of her oils in space, in a strategic clustering that encourages cross-pollination among the works and spills into an enveloping hum.
Now, if every installation creates an atmosphere, the one created by Valentina is (just) more breathable than Goya’s. Although definitely altered by a series of thanatic affects, the emotional temperature of this exhibition is not completely dominated by its affinity with death and dissolution. The sharp gaze settles at times on tender images; the terrifying revelation coexists with playful details; the characters emerging from that hell that is other people alternate with anecdotes of daily and family life. This ambiguity of tone corresponds to the ontological ambiguity proposed by the ensemble: filtered through a range of incandescent reds, scenes taken from the most mundane realism acquire the inconsistency of dreams — or, more precisely, nightmares — performing a oneiric slide that recurs in some of Valentina’s contemporaries, and that constitutes one of the most interesting movements of contemporary painting seeking to look at itself in the mirror of a certain degenerate modernism.
Thus, the exhibition proposes an immersion. An immersion in a palette, in a range of tones (both pictorial and emotional), in a range of states (from corrosive realism to nightmarish surrealism). All this using the minimal elements of painting from the Renaissance to today: canvas, brushes, oils. (To which Valentina adds denim and zippers, a trace of her passion for clothing and textiles). Immersed, and subdued, the viewer experiences one of painting’s secrets: its ability to put us into a trance while displaying an economy of resources.
Two. The sketch of customs
That the whole formed by this exhibition transports us should not make us forget its parts. The cocktail of paintings hits hard, but so does each one individually. By focusing on the portraits, the viewer is reminded that the task of recording and documenting once assigned to painting before the invention of other technical media is not exhausted. The inclusion of scenes of family life, and of a self-portrait of the artist as an overwhelmed mother, may be read through the sharp lessons on the functioning of cognitive capitalism that the Kardashian family offers weekly in their television show: there is no zone of existence that cannot be transformed into a work of art (that is, into a commodity). Or as an acidic nod to the gender protocol that dictates that female sensitivity is condemned to autobiography.
Meanwhile, the series of old ladies having a cortadito in the neighborhood café (a café not notable, not redeemed by the grace of intelligent design) constitutes without doubt a snapshot of life in Buenos Aires today. Or better: of one of its multiple possible lives. These ladies, who on one hand seem to illustrate the concept of inauthentic life (courtesy of the infernal red filter), on the other are freed from the required routines of exploitation and consumption that afflict the rest of the mortals. Cheerfully, these ladies kill time. But unlike the absinthe drinkers of the early century, this killing of time does not carry the certificate of authenticity issued by bohemia. The cortadito does not have the pedigree of the alcoholic drink of the romantics. On the contrary, caffeine is an eminently modern drug associated with what these ladies refuse: the acceleration of work rhythm and productivity. In a kind of deferred revenge, these ladies waste the energizing substance of the cortadito in hours and hours of watching the day pass and scanning newspaper headlines.
In this sense, these paintings do not so much portray the present as remind us that we are fatally bound to it. As if they were saying: there is no way not to be local, contemporary, current. Whatever we paint will return to us the image of this time from which we cannot escape.
But these paintings return something more. Because in these characters, in these recognizable places, in the anecdotes, they inscribe the more or less audible potential latent in every present. A close, careful inspection — contrary to the immersion proposed above — reveals that the portraits function as a platform for the sensual deployment of painting. Strokes, thicknesses, shine, oiliness, volume, scent, contrast, shadows and luminosity move to the foreground; they reappear not as means but as the very ends of the practice. Once the demand to transmit information is fulfilled, the artist is free to surrender to the adventure of pressing the oiled brush to the surface of the canvas — a process of experimentation that has something abstract, something broken and compulsive, allowing the painter, and later the viewer, to surrender to the pleasure of pure color and pure matter.
Encouraging this pleasurable contemplation is one of the triumphs of this exhibition. Once again, we are transported — a less total, more localized transport — a delight that releases the confinement to which the anecdote condemned us. In the colors, the tones, the strokes, in the carnal materiality of these paintings, one senses a beyond to the cortadito without exit. We are fatally here, yes, in the swamp of the present, but at the same time, like the ladies sipping their little coffees in an ode to unproductivity, we can find ways to invert our practices so that they offer to the world, and above all to ourselves, the enjoyment that is demanded of us and denied to us.
Mariano López Seoane.
