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and
the ship sails on ...
-
Óscar Alonso Molina-
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"If
there is no solid land within reach, the ship must be constructed
in the middle of the sea; and not for us, but for our ancestors.
Clearly they knew how to swim and so Š some way, maybe with
driftwood Š constructed first a raft, that has become such
a comfortable vessel that we havenÕt, today, the courage
to jump into the water and start all over again."
-Otto
Neurath-
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The
slave ship with its sinister internal structure, designed for
the intercontinental transport of that shameful cargo with which
the European settlers traded in the New World, was the starting
point for Ivan Larra's (Madrid 1965) recent work, which, since
the year 2000, has been dedicated almost exclusively to graphic
work, and that now returns to the medium of painting with this
exhibition in the Zambucho gallery, in Madrid, where he presents
his most recent work. His previous iconography was centred in
the varied typology of packing, storage and transport containers
– mobile charts and packing cases, trailers, industrial cranes,
pallets, etcetera - through which he hinted (with sophisticated
ellipsis at that which until now has left out of focus the human
figure) at contemporary marketing and the constant presence of
mass production, transformed into pure merchandise, that in our
days controls the, no less, depersonalised world of commercial
exchange.
Something very close to cruelty, to violence, as a factor that
alienates, degrades or deprives the individual, was beneath those
unpolluted images that could be explained comparing them to those
famous images of Andy Warhol. These, with their characteristic
apparent lack of passion allowed them to reflect with diabolic
clarity that which until then had only been an aesthetic intuition:
that the work of art, in the capitalist production universe, incomprehensibly
absorbed the shine of its own stardom. Perhaps the time had arrived,
thanks to Warhol, to give back to the world of images all that
these had retained since they became a real obsession for the
western world: from the great work of art to the star, from the
self-styled objective documentation of the television news or
the written press to publicity, from the neon advertisement to
the fetish... everything, everything could be levelled out for
the sake of an obscene materialism, and without a hierarchy that
would, apparently, liberate us from the authoritarian terror that
comes from desiring one thing more than another...
In Larra's case, only the dramatized skin of the xylography made
sense of the hesitant statement in its determined and undaunted
mechanical, industrial objectivity. But the memory of that vessel
designed to extend worldwide slavery hasnÕt yet completely disappeared
from Larra's current work. His "generic" and mental
scaffolding occupies the whole view of the representation, but
in exchange for such a zoom he has lost his previous clarity of
form, and offers instead a resonance – what else could be
expected from the hold of an empty wooden ship, but that it would
act as an echo chamber for its own internal structure -. In fact,
the lower cross beams, all those walls, beams, basic furniture,
measured and drawn perfectly accurately, keeping in mind strict
profitability factors, are now revealed to the spectatorsÕ view
as what they always were: Abstraction, the attempt to dominate
visually the complexity of the material of some fields of reality
through its graphic, plastic, aesthetic subordination. Before,
the mere presence of the objects impeded the view. As soon as
things are slightly out of position, the view becomes bright and
clear.
Larras' work now clearly shows a greater formality: his images
close upon themselves - Cloistered? - in a complex balance between
the figure and the background, leaving just a little residue of
paint outside the profile of these technically and meticulously
studied pieces. Once more, the original drawing is unyielding
and cold, but the fit of the different parts is the result of
an unknown, long distance view that no one had foreseen at the
beginning of the cruel chain of production whose final aim was
simple profitability: figural and semantic clarity.
Insisting in the image of the slave ship increasingly more obsessed
with it's' own empty shell, now allows us a point of view through
which we can understand the subtle turn seen in Larra's recent
perspective. Otto Neurath's metaphor comes in handy to criticize
Carnap's linguistic fiction: "We are like sailors who
on the open sea must reconstruct our ship, but unable to do so
neither on dry land nor with the best materials. Only the metaphysical
can disappear without leaving a trace. These imprecise and imperfect
pieces continue to be, for good or bad, the materials of the ship".
Our artist seems to give, in his recent work, greater priority
to ambiguous threads, composed of paradoxical torsions or impossible
structural figures competing with each other and where the passive
contemplation of the spectator, seeing the ambivalent nature of
these figures, will never ever conclude. It is precisely here
where this new work gets it absolutely right. Compared with Larra's
previous work, where the alignments and the colouring seemed to
impose itself in an imprecise manner, Larra now retakes the pictorial
tools conscious that his own means advise him to moderate the
optical texture of the language, to balance the graphics and the
stains, to extend the colour register and, above all to limit
technical refinement in the interest of a greater mental control
of the subject.
Similarly to assembly and general instructions of use, all the
rough sketches, the plans, each piece of furniture and architecture
that we can perhaps see in the finished work have all been carefully
planned. This result of Larra's representation of volume reminds
one of a type of uninhibited distortion found in Cubism, which
is related with new generative procedures of the figure that papier
collé and the collage gave. Even with a little attention
the observer of these paintings will discover in the layers of
these works the origin in marquetry and inlay: meticulous and
clearly defined cuts of plywood and laminas inter mixed with paint.
Following the tectonic plate idea, another of the things that
singularizes Larra's work is the importance given to the discontinuity
of the visible. As in the analysis of the co-ordinates that organize
the complex systems carried out with fascinating clarity by Julie
Mehretu, or the constructivism based framework of our Manu Muniategiandikoetxea
– who our artist so admires, or their predecessors like Partenheimer,
Klingelhöller, Artschwager or even Mucha, these pieces increasingly
incline towards the theory of chaos and the deconstructive models
that some town planners, engineers and architects like Tschumi,
Eisenman or Libeskind – deal with in their proposals. Along
with them we should mention Matta-Clark, an intensive and categorical
artist, whose initial training was, precisely, architectural,
and whose work offers an unexpected bridge between these fractured
and unstable constructions and the "non-form" of Bataille,
that at the moment Larra points to. It is precisely perceivable,
in his fine intelligence and sensitive capacity to detect the
monstrous (all that, that according to the aesthetic romanticism
hadnÕt completed its formal teleology), in the most complete form
we could ever imagine: the implacable functionality of the commercial
flow that we saw shamelessly exposed in his old slave ship. And
so, the ship sails on...
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