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Encrypted Messages / Dario Escobar The work that I have been doing throughout the years has been in constant dialogue with the universal History of Art. When I was beginning,...
The work that I have been doing throughout the years has been in constant dialogue with the universal History of Art. When I was beginning, at the end of the 1990s, I was interested in the relationships between "consumption" and "History." I made a series of works in which I used Baroque techniques, such as gold foil, easel painting, and embossed silver to cover everyday objects such as skateboards, stationary bicycles, and basketball hoops, among others. Mass-produced products that came from China, and which were distributed by the so-called "informal trade" of the urban markets in downtown Guatemala City. The intention by using these contrasting products with old Baroque techniques, was to propose the idea of perpetuating a colonizing process. With the difference that, this time, colonization took place at a distance. A process in which the transnationals fulfilled the role of the colonial "comendador" (commander) during the final decade of the 20th century.
That dialogue with Art History, from my Central American context, has been a constant. Two years ago, in Mexico, I had access to the work of the artist Mathias Goeritz, and I discovered a series of ideas that seduced me in terms of thought and sensitivity. In the works that the artist developed at the end of the 1950s, entitled Mensajes dorados (golden messages), Goeritz applies gold leaf on metal sheets, which he then rhythmically perforates based on a coded message that imbues the works with a spiritual function, and which impregnates a halo of light that is refracted by the gold surface. I was captivated.
For many years I collected, along the roads of eastern Guatemala and southern Mexico, signs that ranged from promotional advertisements for small shops to road signs and beverage brands, which were used as daily targets, gunshot receptors, either for fun or intimidation. Initially, these signs were, for me, the support of something beyond what they advertised. They were like the marks on the skin of a gang member. They represented things that I did not understand. From these signs, I made an analogy between what these bullet holes are trying to tell us in everyday life and the Mathias Goeritz series. I discovered that, like Goeritz's Mensajes dorados, there are tangible readings from a literal perspective, but threatening ones from a sensitivity viewpoint. Texts that we don't know, but that we understand. So, I applied, like Goeritz, gold leaf to one face of a sign, and left the other exposed as-is. Basically, I decided to dialogue openly with the artist on a formal and conceptual level.
In this series of works that I have been making since 2019, my fundamental interest is to return the blow, in some way. It uses the opportunity of a second reading to rethink everything that is written, and what we still cannot learn. A manner in which the threat deviates from the meaning, and violence and poetics coexist in the same space of daily life.