Alchemies of the senses

 

Alchemies of the Sense: Arturo Duclos (Chilean).

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, 

Houston, Texas, USA

     The recent work of Chilean artist Arturo Duclos, in particular his series Serifot that he is exhibiting at Sicardi Gallery as part of Armonia Chimica, is among contemporary Latinoamerican art one of the most complete expressions of the postmodernist game with the seduction of meanings. We are confronted with an artist who invites the viewer to walk on the subtle edge that exist between our distance and our identification with the most mundane values of popular culture. The artist avoid the official representations to show the distance between what it is and what it should be. 

     Ordinary and extraordinary, timid and extroverted, circumspect and charming, vain and sophisticated, vulgar and aristocratic, what are this canvases expressing. One hand we find a syncretizing operation in which the artist has gathered in one space the aesthetic values, tastes, preferences and symbolic territories of different social groups that the institutional representations try to maintain separately. On the other, we see the spurt of new beings with their own landscapes and horizonts formed by the alliance of those differences, from the mixtures of created universes. 

     However, it is not, as in Duclos previous work, an ironic signalizing of the simple mixtures of elements. Although a syncretising attitude from his previous work can be perceived, this time mundane tapestries filled with allusions to the kitsch and the social cosmetology do not correspond as much with the Bajtinian inversion of the mask, its fundamentals or the travesty. The artist is not found sheltered behind his canvas syncretising from below, the identification with the impure, inauthentic values, the culture from above, the high aesthetics of the art and its consumption.

      I would hare to say that these works are more intimate, although they are certainly not personal, they do not contain life obsessions or the artists biography. They reveal an existential proposal, much more redeeming than syncretizing, moved by a deep exploration of those mixtures that today form the baroque in souls. Further away from the quotation and the text, Duclos explore a profusion nearly clonal of the original and the copy, where the copulation of the authentic and the impure corresponds with his search of new beings and creatures.

      As in alchemy, it is about finding the new synthesis that the combinated elements engender, not the elements per se. The job of the artist here is one of an archaeologist of the surfaces, looking for the scars of transition and not the origin. 

      Seeing the new works of Duclos, that meticulous labour through which the artist extract from the fabric, with tailor´s precision, what has been subtracted by time , we feel we are walking on a very subtle edge. We find ourselves among allusions to the eccentricity of a decorator who looks for an orchestrated harmony, a wall restorer’s taste for the worn-out, old parchments that give to the material its archaeological time, and a certain imitative aristocracy. But, walking under or over the same drop-curtain that the fabric creates, we slide ourselves through the sensuality of its folds, we start to visualize the erotic and seductive landscapes that the surfaces generate as new poets who emanate from the creaking delirium of the fake.

    We cannot avoid wondering if in the fabrics of Duclos what we have tried to look for in the deep is really on the surface, where the bodies crash. The artist brings to the surface the most hidden texture of the textile, the mysteries of the weft, its unions. The deepest of the skin, Paul Valery used to say. In Duclos fabrics, sense, as the transcendental reason of life, is sliding in the erotic surfaces. The technique is not a way to archieve expression, but an x-ray of the sense, what the artist calls textile transfers. The new canvases of Duclos work in the alchemy of the sense revealing a new esotericism of the soul. An it is from this idea of a new esotericism of the soul—born not from religious systems but from a spiritual speculation, that the works produce the effect of an inventive cabala. It is an art that restores the ornament opposing the baroque as a simple variegation of the figure; its meditative function is inhabited by new gods and mystic villages that constitute the sublime of daily life. 

    Without abandoning a trans-avant garde attitude, it should be said that the sceptic and the nihilistic component of work of attitude that distinguishes the weaving of pictorial classicism and bad forms in all Duclos work, still can be seen in his recent work. It seduces the viewer to visit places where we cannot or do not want to differentiate between the banal and the sublime, the authentic and the inauthentic, the original and the copy. More than a work about meaning, it places the viewer in The Cabala with works about the unsuspected alchemy of the sense.

   Gilles Deleuze states that it would not be an animism, since the sense is precisely the dimension that relates our acts to transformations, transcending the fetichism of the totem. Perhaps this idea of Deleuzes could help us understand why a work so aware of the semiotic and the textual as Duclos could be titled today, in the year 2000, with a phrase as mystic as The Cabala. Or perhaps we can get help from Julia Kristeva, when she affirmed that, in dealing with the sense we must understand that in its most internal limit, the human experience confirms an esoteric feeling. 

   The majority of the references that I use in my work, wrote the artist in his statement, are deeply established in the language of the occidental culture although they appear camouflaged and hidden by a syncretizing delirium over the image and the code of language. Armonia Chimica, like a book, aspires to answer some of the biggest questions of contemporary knowledge, but in a dissipated rigor, in the symbolism of an order that alludes to the seduction of meanings.

Notas

   El texto sobre Arturo Duclos lo escribí luego de varios encuentros con Duclos y Catalina en Houston para que escribiera las palabras del catálogo y discute la muestra que luego fue expuesta para la cual fue su catálogo ese mismo año 2000

Published as the text of the catalogue of Arturo Duclos 2000 exhibit at Sicardi Gallery, Houston, Texas, EUA