Mechanical Ventilation.
Between Modernist Construction and Contemporary Assemblage.
Juan Ledezma
Round bundles of lint lie on a low-rise table. They are analogs of the artist’s body, excised through the mechanical fanning of air upon his clothes. Tumble-dried, the remnants of the artist’s worn presence have been randomly arranged across a grid of white squares. Thereby Luis Roldán, whose everyday life is inscribed in the work under the mode of a precarious autobiography—the minor narrative of his private experience—tumbles and recycles a roll of modernist references: the grid and involuntary sculpture, for instance; or, closer to neo-avant-garde pursuits, the flatbed as the support of chance encounters. Yet it is mainly the machine, that other paradigm of now dysfunctional modernist drives, which provides Roldán with a tool for mapping quotidian space against the grain of historical referents. “Mechanical Ventilation,” the title of the exhibition that brings together his most recent works, alludes to the fact that foregone formal models cannot be breathed back to life—redeemed, say—without contrivance. Artificial rehabilitation is nonetheless required, a survival strategy: it is through the mediation of historical templates that the artist reinstills sense into experience—emphatically personal, yet endowed with a public resonance—within the at once exhausted and cluttered space of contemporary life.
Here the mediation in question involves revisiting the work of Willys de Castro, the Brazilian modernist. In the 1950s, De Castro reconstructed perception itself through a series of “objects”—hybrids, actually, between painting and sculpture—which demand the viewer to combine their frontal and lateral planes into a fragmented, plural unity. Thereby, De Castro segmented the apprehension of his works and distended it in time. This he did also through a recursive use of modules, disconnected geometric shapes that appear on the verge of locking into a form while dismantling it. As is painting, so is poetry: De Castro’s (neo)concrete poems treat words as modular units, extricated from the linear succession of the verse and spaced out across the page. In this case, it is the construction of sense—the closure of poetic form—that is suspended, as the disconnection between the poem’s verbal blocks fragment and distend the act of reading. Roldán, too, resorts to the module when making his works. Yet with De Castro it was a question of modularity and construction; with Roldán, quite on the contrary, the question revolves around modularity and assemblage. Rather than activating or reconstructing fragmented formal wholes—conforming, then, to the modernist prefiguration of subjects engaged in the production of their lived space—the viewers of Roldán’s works confront precarious artifacts which no longer presume a collective engagement with the technical reorganization of life. Yet mechanical ventilation, the overriding trope of this exhibition, still invokes a technical mode of perception. It is, however, a different modality of technique that informs these assemblages: the operative incapacity of technology, however developed it might now be, for structuring a “cognitive map” that could orient contemporary subjects in collective space.[1] As that space is saturated by digital clutter—the current surfeit of information that piles up as so much noise—the artist retreats into a private territory of objects marked by the analogical, indexical traces of individual experience. There entrenched, Roldán’s works declare themselves “unmonumental”—the bearers of a minimal, insistently personal materiality.[2]
Forged in different time periods, the projects are programmatically different. Yet it is their historical distance that links them. For Roldán’s assembled works stretch back to the modernist’s constructions to perform a labor, one might say, of negative redemption. The assemblages redeem a modular and mechanical logic from De Castro’s “active objects,” only to divert it in the formation of disjointed, when not dysfunctional structures. This is most evident in a series of drawings that bear the diluted writing of a story through which Roldán fictionalizes his everyday experience. The narrative’s legibility is further blocked by the stenciled diagrams of mechanical ventilation’s “flow patterns”—diagrams which the artist obtained from scientific journals and uses in these works as recurrent modules. These graphs section the flow of the narrator’s voice across the plane. They also underscore the fact that such a voice only issues forth under erasure, as if afflicted by a shortness of breath. Effaced and modular, Roldán’s narrative gives itself over to time, pause, and silence: the three components that, according to Ferreira Gular, modulate the spread of the page in neoconcrete poetry and open it up to the space of “duration.”[3] Such a space, however, is no longer an open field in which either the viewer or reader would forge constructive connections between the work and other registers of reality, in an ongoing production of sense. The connections are still to be made, and sense produced, yet now precariously, under the mode of assemblage. Within the exhausted space of contemporary life, Roldán’s works call for a time to pause.
[1] Cf. Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, ed., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347–357.
[2] The term is discussed in the curatorial text of an eponymous exhibition: Laura Hoptman, “Unmonumental: Going to Pieces in the 21st Century,” in Unmonumental. The Object in the 21st Century (New York and London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2007), 128–138.
[3] Ferreira Gular. “Manifiesto neoconcreto” (1959), in América Fría. La abstracción geométrica en Latinoamérica (1934–1973) (Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 2011).
Luis Roldán (Colombia - 1955) studied Art History at the École du Louvre (Paris), and Architecture at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá, Colombia). He has exhibited extensively in Colombia and the United States and was part of the Latin American Pavilion in the 2009 Venice Biennale. He has won numerous awards such as the Luis Caballero Award (Bogotá) and the National Award in Visual Arts (Colombia). He lives and works both in New York City and Bogotá. His work is included in important collections such as Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Museo del Barrio and Deutsche Bank Collection, New York; FEMSA Collection, Monterrey; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami and the Museums of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, Bogotá and Medellín.
Willys de Castro (Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, 1926 - São Paulo, 1988). Painter, engraver, draughtsman, scenographer, costume designer and graphic artist. In 1950, he began an apprenticeship in graphic arts, executing his first abstract-geometric paintings and drawings. In 1958, he went to study in Europe, and in the following year back Brazil, joined the Grupo Neoconcreto [Neoconcretist Group] in Rio de Janeiro. Between 1959 and 1962, he worked on the Objetos Ativos [Active Objects] series, which explore plane and volume as plastic elements, questioning the use of the canvas as a support for pictorial language. His work is included in important collections such as Instituto da Arte Contemporanea, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, and Museo de Arte de São Paulo, Sao Paulo; The Museum of Modern Art and Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York