Luis Molina-Pantin : Chelsea Gallery
His recent research adds new elements to the reflection on the contemporary art system, of an aesthetic and economic nature, documenting the progressive disappearance of art, induced by the abuse of the artist, by the domination of economic factors, by the show business of the media. The strategy is to put the system in check, revealing and neutralising it through a self-referential paradox, an accident, a short circuit.
The risk of being self-referential in art has been perceived in the past as an evil to be fought, a risk to be avoided.
It could be said that, from Duchamp and Manzoni onwards, art has always been suspicious in terms of reflectiveness. Ironically, wondering about the subject in art already embarrasses us.
The subiectum is, in the proper sense, what is placed underneath, submitted and therefore, by extension, the topic or theme. But in grammar it is the person who does or undergoes an action expressed by the verb, in philosophy it is the I as a thinking reality, in both cases in contrast with the object thought or on which the action of the subject falls. The subject struggles between doing and being.
It is worth keeping in mind, almost as a starting point, the Hegelian principle of the superimposition between subject and object.
And, from here, we can see how, in Deleuze's concepts of difference and repetition, in the same aesthetic of post-production theorized by Nicolas Bourriaud, but also in Marco Senaldi's Cover Theory, the seeds of reflectivity emerge.
Slavoj Žižek writes, with happy intuition, that starting from the Hegelian idea of the impossibility of seeing the object (since the subject cannot directly see the real object of fascination) he carries out a sort of reflection in itself where the object that fascinates him becomes the gaze itself. ... Gaze and object are "reflective" objects, that is, objects that embody an impossibility.
This impossibility and helplessness have often led art to investigate itself. Mirroring and self-representation are the guidelines, for instance, of the entire research of Giulio Paolini.
Between 1670 and 1675 the Flemish Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts, known for his still lifes, painted the back of a picture. The idea was to induce the observer to turn it to see a front that did not exist.
The work represents nothing other than the negation of itself, and folds up on its negative. The theme of self-referentiality is a life motif in the History of Art, from ancient art, as is the case with the 17th-century 'cabinet d'amateur' and the allegories of painting, until nowadays: think of Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise or to the museums and deserted libraries photographed by Candida Höfer. Think of Struth's upturned visitors or his games of references (the photo of the public at the exhibitions), to the Cattelan that emerges from the floor at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. There is a 2002 photograph by Santiago Sierra, entitled Space, closed by corrugated metal which represents nothing more than the facade of his London gallery, the Lisson, closed with the shutters down.
The work disappears in the analytical inventory, in the celebration of the patron or the collector, in the exhibition context, in the prevarication of the artist. Finally, as argued by Jean Baudrillard, victim of the total aestheticization of the world induced by the pervasiveness of the media, art disappears, collapsing into reality.
Luis Molina-Pantin, born in Geneva in 1969 and moved to Caracas, has made this disappearance and this impotence his research. In the New Landscape series he has photographed, with an archival spirit, cheap everyday objects and souvenirs that reproduce landscapes. In modern society, the theme of travel within the global village is dominant. But very often it results in a big misunderstanding. And the information circulates for us, so that the journey thrives on mediation, on glossy postcard stereotypes. In these works, the artist has documented his inability to deal with landscape painting.
Likewise, the history of the twentieth century has been retraced through the portraits of its protagonists, reproduced on the banknotes in his series 'Lider of the XX' while everyday life has been replaced with that artificial and immutable stage of television soap operas, according to the principle of overturning between reality and fiction. Elsewhere, the impotence is reflected in the immobility of the man seduced by the deception of a staged reality, incubated in the plastic and aseptic comfort of an airline advertising campaign.
In the post-critical contemporary age, dominated by the reasons of the market, by the logic of the correspondence between cultural and economic value, the focus on the work is replaced by the central position of the gallery, as a relational context of accreditation in the gallery-dealer-collector-
In the new 'Chelsea Galleries' series, the subject-object represented is, in fact, the exhibition space. Giving away any temptation for aesthetic transfiguration, Molina-Pantin photographed the galleries that are concentrated in the New York district considered the mecca of the world market. Entire buildings occupied by galleries -with the largest ones busy building their own palaces- celebrating themselves with the most attractive architectural structures.
An enchanted scenario, a sort of paradise to which all artists aspire, in which art is selected, archived, constructed and rejected. It behaves like a great machine of consumerism: an accelerator and devourer of works and artists but, at the same time, a formidable producer of an enormous amount of art waste. In the words of Zygmunt Bauman (and also Italo Calvino) the other side of the contemporary art boom today is the huge global dump of art expelled and rejected by the system.
The self-celebration of art in Chelsea's galleries, places art in the background. Luis Molina-Pantin, not surprisingly, observes that galleries often end up being more beautiful than what they contain and thus themselves become works of art.
Contemporary cathedrals, factories indeed (in the old way, like buildings under construction) never finished, in perennial transformation, in the continuous and vain search for their own content.
The photos of Molina-Pantin are born in an abusive atmosphere, that is, they've been made secretly, in the same way the paparazzi undermine the celebrities, assuming as a practice the inadequacy of art and the artist. And they are illegally exhibited in a gallery, generating a sort of short circuit; the absurd result is a galleries show in a gallery.
The choice of retaking the reception areas -and not the spaces dedicated to exhibitions- is determined by the fact that there lies the beating heart of the institution. There is where the choices are made, the core center of communication.
The reception areas are similar to each other, as a standard replica (a sort of mannerism) in the organization of the space, and all reception areas resemble the command bridge of a large ship: counters with built-in screens, telephones and, behind them, imposing bookcases full of the same books and wall shelves where each artist is recorded, cataloged and archived according to universal standards, in mostly black folders with white labels.
Luis Molina-Pantin's work overturns the roles, making the gears and logic on which the art system and star system, with its conventions, and its stereotypes are based, ineffective and exhausted. But at the same time he takes on the ironic connotations of a disenchanted investigation into the role and meaning of art.
Luis Molina-Pantin's work overturns the roles, making ineffective and exhausted the gears and logic on which the art system and the star system, with its conventions and its stereotypes are based. But at the same time he takes on the ironic connotations of a disenchanted investigation into the role and the meaning of art.
Alfredo Sigolo/Lola Gonzalez
