Pájaros en la cabeza - Mónica Cuba & Isabelle Decencière

I started this blog a long time ago, or at least that’s how it feels to me. It’s hard to remember what was going on in my life in 2010 when I started posting my drawings here, and getting less than a thousand visitors a month. Today, any day actually, I get at least 2,000 visits, which translates to 60,000 visits a month. 

blog information (please click on it for a larger version) / información del blog (hagan click para agrandar)

I guess I’ve learned a few things about Search Engine Optimization, key words, digital ads and so on. 2014 has been the best year for this blog, not only because visits have increased considerably, but also because for the first time in my life I’m actually making money with this. Granted, it’s only a couple of bucks a month, but still that’s so much better than zero cents.

my drawing still in process / mi dibujo todavía en proceso

Certainly, I thank you –all of you– for your continuous support. Without you, the reader, this blog would have disappeared a long time ago. In recent months I’ve understood that I have a responsibility to my readers so I’ve tried to improve the quality of my posts, that means that now I’m giving more priority to what I write about instead of how often I do it. That is why you can observe that now I post less frequently… 

The second change you can observe is that now I’m writing less about art galleries and more about comic books. The reason is quite simple: most of my posts about contemporary art receive less visits than the average post, and sometimes they get zero comments. 

The conclusion is obvious: people come here to read about comics and films but not necessarily about art galleries, which is fine by me. I’ll continue talking about art exhibitions, as they are a part of my life, but I won’t do it as often as I used to.

Just to show you an example of what I’m talking about, I’m attaching a list of posts so you can see how many visits I get for each one of them. My article about Bryan Singer’s sexual scandal, aptly titled “Days of Scandals Past” has received over one thousand hits, my posts about comics have more than one hundred visits (combining the amount of hits, the total would be around 500), and the final post has only 72 hits, and it’s no coincidence that it is a post dedicated to an art exhibition. I rest my case. 
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Ayer jueves se inauguró en Dédalo la muestra bipersonal “Pájaros en la cabeza” de Mónica Cuba e Isabelle Decencière, grandes amigas y talentosas artistas que han reunido su creatividad en un proyecto admirable. 

Con esculturas y piezas ornamentales de cerámica y madera, ambas artistas han explorado la frase que da título a la muestra, fabricando primorosamente personajes con pájaros que anidan en sus cabezas. La curaduría de la muestra es notable, y eso se hace evidente al ver la forma en que las piezas de Mónica dialogan con las de Isabelle, llenando el espacio de colorido y armonía.

Por supuesto, apenas llegué a Dédalo las saludé y las felicité por una muestra tan maravillosa. Luego me quedé conversando un par de horas con mi amigo Andreé Ferro, así que tuve oportunidad de hablar sobre mi viaje a Santa Cruz (Bolivia), los enredos de la Embajada de Malasia y los nuevos proyectos que, desde ahora, estoy preparando.

Les recomiendo que se den una vuelta por Sáenz Peña y visitan la sala de exposiciones de Dédalo. Quedarán sorprendidos al ver obras de tan alto vuelo.

Mamamia Dédalo

17 years ago a friend of mine showed me something that I had not seen before: The Death of Superman in a brasilian edition, obviously in Portuguese. Since I have always been interested in this sort of curiosities he gave me that rare edition.

Superman: 75 years of uninterrupted publication / Superman: 75 años de publicación ininterrumpida

I drew this 3 years ago / dibujé esto hace 3 años

I was already a Superman fan but I had stopped reading the adventures of the Man of Steel after Byrne left the title. The saga of the death and consequent resurrection of the most famous superhero in the world brought me back. And that was good because that's how I discovered Mark Millar, after all, he wrote "Superman: Red Son", which in my opinion is one of the best Superman stories ever.

I started reading comics with Byrne’s Superman, and to know that everything he made in the title was revamped, dismissed and / or forgotten made me feel as angry as the Hulk in a bad day. 

If I talk about Superman I think of Byrne and everything the writer did with the character in the 80’s. Byrne always said that his approach was the same he had with FF and other titles: “back to the basics”, he wanted to explore what was great about Superman, he wanted to incorporate as much elements from his past as possible and then write his own story / history; the author's work was very respectful and at the same time original and valuable. What I see now is no respect for what he did and a complete lack of editorial direction. And so I stopped reading Superman. I haven't read Superman in years. But in a way, I'm always there. Byrne, Millar, Moore, Busiek so many great authors have created unforgettable stories about the last son of Krypton.

On April 18th every comic fan has celebrated the 75th anniversary of Action Comics # 1, Superman's first historical appearance. Surely, the world has changed a lot in 75 years but Superman continues to be an icon, an ideal of nobility and heroism. Let's make a toast to commemorate this date. Long Live Superman!
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Ayer jueves se inauguró Mamamia, en Dédalo. Al tratarse de una de las muestras más importantes del año, el evento fue a todo dar. Hubo un gran número de invitados, y fue también la ocasión perfecta para encontrarme con mi amigo Andreé Ferro. Salí de COSAS un poco más tarde de lo que había planeado, pero igual llegué a tiempo para coincidir con él. 

La muestra de este año presenta una enorme variedad de objetos preciosos, en una cuidada selección que nos impulsa a comprar de todo. Tal como le dije a Erika Beleván cuando me entrevistaba para “Polizontes”, dar regalos a una madre suele ser una tarea complicada, pero gracias a la nutrida oferta de Dédalo ya sé qué regalar el segundo domingo de mayo. También me encontré con Gonzalo Pazos Navarro, y conversamos brevemente. Gonzalo es amigo de Pablo Alayza y Kuno Vollprecht, un grupo de chicos del Pestalozzi que se han hecho conocidos como músicos al haberse presentado en Dédalo ya tantas veces. Por supuesto, le dije a Erika que Gonzalo se moría de ganas de ser entrevistado, así que de inmediato Erika lo abordó y le hizo todo tipo de preguntas curiosas. Esperemos que ese divertido segmento se emita en el próximo capítulo del programa de Plus TV.

Mientras Andreé se reencontró con una amiga de su colegio, yo saludé a María Elena Fernández, Eduardo Lores, Gabriel Lores, Sebastián Lores y Sofía Lores, quien tuvo la gentileza de acercarse y tomarnos un par de fotos. También hablé brevemente con Pedro Casusol, y conversé muchísimo rato con el artista Hugo Salazar, que por fin se animó a salir por una noche del circuito artístico sanisidrino para entrar al barranquino. En el transcurso de la noche saludé a Rhony Alhalel, Ilse Rehder, Pablo Villaizán, John Chauca, entre otros. 

Como siempre, fue un gusto haber asistido a la inauguración de Mamamia, me divertí muchísimo y además, después de tantas horas de trabajo en la oficina, le di la bienvenida a los cocteles de Aperol, las copas de champagne y los vasos de chilcano, cortesía de Pisco Larroca. ¿Y ustedes ya decidieron qué regalos van a hacer por el día de la madre?

Jóvenes talentos - Galería John Harriman / Británico

Lost in Translation (2003)
Directed by Sofia Coppola

The first minutes of Sofia Coppola’s best film to date are quite revealing: A woman, Scarlett Johansson, is in a five star hotel, beholding Tokyo’s skyline. A man, Bill Murray, looks through a car’s window, curious perhaps, but above all estranged. Combining a deeply poignant music with suggestive images, the director creates a world, a filmic universe that captures our attention immediately. What Sofia Coppola does in the opening frames is what many filmmakers struggle to achieve in their entire careers.

Throughout the film there is always a certain feeling of longing, of loneliness; longing for a different tomorrow, and loneliness as the confirmation that the one constant in human condition is discontent. Many critics must have explored the lack of communication as a fundamental key in “Lost in Translation”, both as the obvious reference of the title and also as an indicator of all that we can’t put into language.

Perhaps in the best role of his career, Bill Murray plays Bob Harris, a washed-out actor that used to be a super star and now has to endorse a Japanese whisky to make a couple of million bucks. He feels like an alien in Tokyo. But he’s also a specular image of the Japanese people’s own alienated condition. Westernized to the extreme, the Japanese have lost their essence, they are the living example of how further can people go in order to disallow themselves.

Giovanni Ribisi’s character, a professional photographer also ponders on it: Japanese rock and roll groups that have no substance and exist only thanks to the decoration, the false reality that photography and the right publicity stunt can imprint on them. The photographer is there to sustain the alienation process, even if he disagrees with the falseness of it all.

In the same way, Bob Harris has to synthetize in a TV commercial what the Japanese consider the core of Western elegance and sophistication. He is asked to be Roger Moore, Frank Sinatra, he is asked to perform not as the white man he is but as the white man they need him to be. Of course, there can be no words or guidelines for such a taxing acting job. And that’s why also it’s impossible for the interpreters to translate the instructions given to him. Not only are words lost in translation, but also there is an unnamed need, a ‘real’ that threatens to irrupt into reality, and as Lacan explains in his psychoanalytic theory, the real exceeds the language, the real can never exist within the boundaries of the symbolic, id est, language.

Bob Harris is an exhausted man that finds alcohol soothing, although just barely. After 25 years of marriage he is unhappy. Between him and his wife no real communication exists. What takes place, however, is a very insistent simulacrum, much in the same way that everything takes place in Japan. Philosopher Alan Badiou’s talks about the importance of the simulacrum in postmodern society; if Sofia Coppola’s film is more revealing and enthralling than anything else out there is precisely because it embraces contemporaneity to the maximum; this isn’t a film about explanations, about outcomes, which would be a modernist approach; this is a postmodern film in the way that it sates our hunger for art, for beauty and for intellectual value while establishing what Derrida proposed in his deconstruction theory: knowledge can never be complete. When Bob’s wife sends him a fax, or Fed-Exes carpet samples, or calls him, it’s all a simulacrum. They are never able to connect with each other, not even at the most basic of levels.

my page / mi página

In the same manner, Charlotte, extraordinarily interpreted by Scarlett Johansson seems to be drifting away. She’s married to a successful photographer but she can’t figure out what to do with her time. There is no meaning for life, and that thought depresses her and fills her heart with anguish. She tries to get into self-help audiobooks to feel better, to no avail. The entire boom of auto-help material is also an example of Badiou’s simulacrum; thousands if not millions of these books are written each year, and yet they are all useless. Life cannot be summarized, standardized and explained so that you can feel better. But despair takes the best of us all, and thus self-help becomes the one and only thing that sells out nowadays.

When Charlotte and Bob meet in the hotel’s bar, they recognize in the other the same existential doubts, the same sensibilities, and they feel connected. They are the only characters able to actually communicate with each other. Their bond is intensified when contrasted with the world around them, for example, with Charlotte’s Japanese friends who are so absolutely alienated and have tried so hard to look and act like Americans that end up as ridiculous and pathetic creatures. Tokyo is a city that denies its past, its traditions, so much that it’s simply brutal to see how its inhabitants behave.

However, there is still some true beauty left (beauty as it would be understood in the Genji Monogatari and other traditional Japanese works of art), and Coppola gives us a glimpse of it, in a couple of moments. Nevertheless, this beauty, this true spirit, is constantly covered by the appalling reality that surrounds the protagonists. When Bob Harris receives the visit of a woman wearing sexy stockings, we are privy to yet another example of westernized acculturation and fantasies, although here the fantasy instead of covering the horror of the real merely exacerbates the void, the structural fissures of Japan’s society.

Sofia Coppola’s masterwork resonates deeply inside of us because it’s one of the most refined and superb portrayals of the human condition in cinema’s history. The final scene, of course, proves once again that there is no such thing as a happy ending, and precisely because of that it reminds us that life is just like that, unpredictable, full of suffering but also possibilities of change and, of course, free will. Lost in Translation makes it into my personal top twenty without a second thought. 
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Hace más de una década que no visito Cusco y mis últimos viajes han sido o bien a Estados Unidos o bien a países vecinos como Colombia, la tierra de mi padre. Así es que considero una falta grave, de mi parte, estar desconectado de lo que sucede fuera de Lima. Más aún en términos artísticos.

Por suerte, aunque sea levemente, algo de esto se puede subsanar gracias a la admirable labor de la curadora Élida Román, quien se ha esforzado en descentralizar el arte. Así, con el apoyo de la galería John Harriman del Británico, ella ha logrado organizar una muestra anual enfocada en artistas de provincias, en este caso, de Cusco.

La muestra “Jóvenes talentos” reúne las originales y sugerentes esculturas en piedra y metal de Edwin Huamán y los fantásticos cuadros del artista plástico Richard Peralta. Acostumbrado al arte contemporáneo limeño, debo admitir que quedé gratamente sorprendido por el altísimo nivel de calidad de los trabajos seleccionados para esta muestra. Tantos las esculturas como los cuadros me transmitieron una fuerza y una energía que a veces no se percibe en obras de artistas locales. La muestra quedará abierta al público en la galería John Harriman (Jr. Bellavista 531 / Malecón Balta 740. Miraflores) desde el día de mañana hasta el 31 de marzo. Vayan a verla, realmente vale la pena.

Me enteré de la muestra gracias a mis amigos Andreé Ferro y Natalia Higa, justamente hace un par de semanas, los tres nos reunimos en el café Gianfranco y conversamos con Élida Román mientras comíamos helados artesanales. Conozco más artistas que curadores, pero considero sumamente valiosa la opinión de una conocedora del arte que está en constante búsqueda de nuevos talentos. Gracias a ese afán, Élida ha descubierto para nosotros la obra de dos cusqueños con propuestas artísticas de primer nivel.

Además de conversar con Andreé y Natalia durante la inauguración, también me encontré con varias amistades como Mariloli de Koechlin y artistas como Joseph de Utia. Lo cierto es que, tras conversar brevemente con ellos (y tomarme un par de vasos de whisky y algunas copas de vino tinto y blanco, dicho sea de paso), todos estuvieron de acuerdo en una cosa: la originalidad y lucimiento de los trabajos expuestos.

Por esas casualidades de la vida, la primera vez que un escritor me firmó un libro Andreé estaba presente, y eso me ha hecho pensar en la gran cantidad de libros autografiados que tengo actualmente, entre ellos “La piedra alada” del genial poeta José Watanabe. Ahí van la foto del libro y del autógrafo. Y también he decidido incluir una de mis páginas completas para un próximo cómic (así como el gran dibujante Keith Giffen se inspiró en el genial artista francés Druillet a principios de los 80, yo también intenté plasmar, sobre todo en la primera viñeta, el estilo y la composición del ilustrador galo).