Gabriel Palumbo
09/17/2021 3:32 PM
Clarín.com
Magazine Ñ
Art
Updated 09/17/2021 3:32 PM
The visual aesthetic experience begins with the gaze. It is through it that we can enrich our relationship with the world, that we can understand how our contemporaries live the world, how they organize their belief and value systems. That is why you always have to be with your eyes wide open, to discover the latent possibilities, the new realities that enable spaces of sensitivity that were there but had not been deployed. Technology, cold in its first appearance, distant in its complexity, has long added value to the artistic experience in many ways. Augmented reality (AR) is a resource used by large museums, such as the
Guggenheim in Bilbao
and by great artists, such as
Olafur Eliasson
, KAWS or the Argentine
Tomás Saraceno
to enrich the vitality of the visual both inside the exhibition spaces and in the public space.
Starting on the 24th of this month, at FOLA, it will be possible to see
Sonata de cruces posible
, an exhibition that uses this technology, with photographs by
Gian Paolo MInelli
intervened with digital augmented reality works by
Rafael Parra Toro
, and curated by
Agustina Rinaldi
.
His work consisted, as in an original sonata, in
making different musicalities and poetics sound
.
Minelli's images have the visual power that is typical of his work, but in this case,
the intensity increases thanks to the object of the photographs
.
The shots in this series, which were expressly produced for this occasion and which were
taken from a cell phone
, reflect the most crude and closed moment of confinement in the pandemic and its impact on the urban scene. The desolation, the helplessness, the absence of the human and the sadness that the images convey is moving and moving. The handling of lights and shadows, of presences and absences, the spotlight on a door or a lattice, are lines that emphasize the anguished abandonment of an unused parking lot or the loneliness of an avenue without public transport, without cars or people.
The worst face of confinement
serves Minelli to demonstrate his enormous expressive capacity, which we already saw in the series
Playa
, in 2009 or in
Cité des Poetes
from 2010.
An Augmented Reality experience, on the pages of Ñ.
Rinaldi's curatorial operation is both
conceptual and visual
.
From the analytical point of view, it recognizes the hybridization and liquefaction of the borders between the real and the virtual as something possible, necessary and virtuous, and on the other hand, it
adds beauty and digital vitalism
through the works of Parra Toro.
His training as an engineer and his work with video games has given the Venezuelan-born artist a great technical capacity that he now turns to in his artistic production.
For this exhibition, Parra Toro designed for each of Minelli's photographs,
an augmented reality work that modifies it, without touching or removing the image
.
Quite the contrary, digital works complete the urban landscape by adding vitalism, color and additional power to it.
By just using their cell phones, visitors will be faced with
a new experience
, which they can appropriate, to transmit and give, in turn, a different path, an uncontrollable itinerary in the territory of social networks and the Internet.
As in these pages, next to each photograph in the room there will be
a QR code that, when scanned and placed against the image
from the Instagram application,
will make the collaborative works of Minelli and Parra Toro appear
.
Visitors will be able to go through the effects of the works and, therefore, be part of them in an interactive way, beyond the gaze.
The streets of downtown Buenos Aires, desolate during the pandemic, were taken with a cell phone by the renowned photographer Gian Paolo Minelli.
Whoever does this will find, for example, that in a photograph of a totally desolate, closed and empty parking lot, in which the sunlight passing through a half shadow makes capricious geometric drawings on the wall and the floor, some shapes between round and oval, that look like glass, red and white.
The spheres advance towards the viewer and their path is infinite, one more always appears at the end of the row.
When moving the mobile device, the works of Parra Toro move away from each other and that is where the visitor will be able to interpose themselves between them and be part of the work, as one more compositional element.
In another photograph, an image of downtown Buenos Aires without cars or people, the perspective of the shot shows a series of buildings and walls. In one of them, you can see the trace of an absent poster that knew how to advertise that chain of stores that left the country during the pandemic, closing its stores. Some orange cones point out and demarcate nothingness, take care of what no one challenges, collect dust and become useless. With the code on the phone,
the job is complete
.
The poster that is no longer bursts into a thousand endless pieces, like a glass or a mirror, throwing the sharp triangular particles into the air, which come to meet and enlarge when the cell phone moves.
This work manages to capture the pandemic moment in a particular way.
The city is broken, the job is broken and the mirror is also broken, completing the metaphor that asks about the consequences of confinement.
Scan the QR and then point to the photo ... in a few seconds Rafael Parra Toro's animations will appear, different for each image.
Another urban landscape, a deserted downtown avenue, has only the slightly human trace of letters on a public signage poster. The phrase is forceful and familiar "Keep your distance." The order that comes from power leaves no doubt, does not suggest, is exhaustive in its brevity. The photo is moving, the buttresses of some buildings act like planes of a cubist work, only the green of some trees give it a natural color, surrounded by artifice, cement and emptiness. Parra Toro's intervention makes the scene even more complex. The letters of the word distanced appear floating in the photograph and move with the cell phone. There is a way to form the entire word on a blank sign next to the official sign, but doing so requires some skill from the gamer. The letters open and grow apart,as obeying the mandate, and the viewer may interpose between them to prevent the censoring act from taking place.
The appropriation of the pandemic reality of the artistic combination of Parra Toro and Minelli
and their resignification have an implicit, clear and liberating message in this work.
The
Sonata of possible crosses
imagined by Rinaldi and exhibited at FOLA is correct in two fundamental aspects.
It is intensely contemporary in its aesthetic resolution, but it is also contemporary in its conceptual formulation.
The idea of
continuity of the work of art outside the limits of the exhibition space
, of the sample and of the artists themselves places this exhibition in a line of analytical continuity that contemplates the most current topics of discussion in the art world .
That something like this happens in Argentina is great news.
Sonata of possible crosses - VVAA
Place:
FOLA, Godoy Cruz 2626, floor 1
Hours:
from 12 to 19:00 (Wed closed)
Date:
until November 21
Admission:
$ 200 general