Disco rayado - John Chauca Laurente (Galería Yvonne Sanguineti)

Kaboom (2010)
Directed by Gregg Araki 

Gregg Araki's films share a special signature. As a filmmaker, his interest towards certain themes are aptly exploited in different and peculiar ways. In "Mysterious Skin" we witness the alien abduction fantasy embraced by one of the protagonists, in "Nowhere" an alien invasion serves both as a metaphor and as in incursion into the real. In Kaboom, Araki plays again with that which surpasses normal humanity, redefining it in the process.

We find ourselves immersed in a story about college, young men and women, mysterious murders, secret societies and conspiracy theories that, somehow, mingle together with a surreal sensitivity. The first scene takes us to Smith's mind, an 18-year-old student… or, more exactly, to a dream he has been having frequently. After that he starts masturbating while fantasizing with his roommate Thor, a blonde surfer with perfect abs. Smith, however, doesn't want to be labeled… he considers himself neither gay nor bisexual. He has indeed sexual encounters with boys and girls, but his best friend Stella is convinced that he leans more towards guys. Stella is a lesbian that finds conflict in a risky relationship with a girl that has, to put it mildly, supernatural abilities.

At the same time, Smith finds out that a girl from college, one that appears in his dreams, has been murdered by men in black disguised with animal masks. Except he cannot be sure if he's imagining things because of the hallucinogen drugs he takes or simply because he's becoming paranoid and losing his mind in the process. It's college and there are drugs and alcohol everywhere; here actually one of Araki's favorite actors, James Duval, interprets the typical school "stoner", who pretty much sums up Stella's assertion: "college is just an intermission between high school and the rest of your life. Four years of having sex, making stupid mistakes and experiencing stuff".

When Stella has sex with her girlfriend there is a special luminosity that announces a supernatural element… and when Smith agrees to engage in sexual intercourse with a lighthearted girl named London he also experiences a weird luminescence which he attributes to drugs. In the same way he cannot define himself as homosexual or bisexual, he is also constantly escaping out of normal consciousness, which is made clear with the dream at the beginning of the film. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would correlate the privileged mode in which we capture our own selves through narcissistic investment with the type of knowledge based on the 'illusion of consciousness' in which it is implied that the entire reality could become accessible to the mind, turned inside-out, and as a result, it could be illuminated and made transparent. Kaboom deals closely with this illusion of consciousness; it explores the mindset of Smith taking him constantly to different extremes of realities.

my drawing: from pencils to inks /
mi dibujo: del lápiz a la tinta

This illusion, however, is insufficient if Smith is to find his place in the world, and he experiences its limitation when he confronts the phenomenon of the strange -with all its connotations, the stranger, the alien, the unfamiliar- here exemplified by the animal mask men that start chasing him; it doesn't matter if they are after him or if he's only imagining it, but the important thing is that he experiences fear (and thanks to the director's skills, we also experience the suspense of the persecutions); this seriously puts into question the very possibility of auto-transparency or auto-knowledge for Smith.

Perhaps this is all linked with Smith's lack of a parental figure, as Lacanian theory would tell us it is the nom de pere or name of the father that inscribes the subject into the symbolic order. Smith has a loving mother, but he has never met his father who was conveniently reported dead in a car accident just before he was born. Without the name of the father, without the castration which takes place when the father removes any possibility of the mother having the phallus, it's clear that the individual, in this case Smith, would always be out of place or at least displaced from society. In a world ruled by heterosexual normativity, Smith has no clear space or location, and in the same way sexuality means for him to wander around aimlessly, he also starts slipping into an uncomfortable fissure that brings forth elements of reality and also from his personal oneiric world.

I think no other director could have pulled this off. Kaboom succeeds in forcing us, the viewers, to reevaluate what we think, to defy established knowledge. When Smith finds out the truth behind the murders and the truth behind his father's death, he will no longer be able to see the world as he used to. But then again doesn't the same thing happen to us, as we grow up?
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John Chauca Laurente es un artista de reconocida trayectoria que ha logrado sorprender al público una y otra vez. Y esta es una difícil tarea, que muy pocos logran cumplir cabalmente. Porque además del buen arte hace falta también una buena propuesta artística, y finalmente hace falta romper un poco los moldes, ir más allá de la norma establecida, confiar en que el don de la originalidad elevará de categoría a la obra. Por suerte, John Chauca ha logrado todo esto, y la evidencia se encuentra sobre todo en sus muestras individuales en la Galería Yvonne Sanguineti (“Al fondo… ¿hay sitio?” y “Fantasías animadas de ayer y hoy”).

En esta ocasión, la sala barranquina presenta “Disco rayado”, un magnífico ejercicio creativo que se apoya por partes iguales en la ironía, en el homenaje a la cultura pop y en el redescubrimiento de los placeres analógicos que, en la actualidad, han sido reemplazados por la frialdad de lo digital. 

Los cuadros o bien presentan formas circulares o se aprovechan de la circunferencia para delimitar el tema visual central; y claro, también tenemos cuadros que son discos que se han convertido en los lienzos que utiliza el artista. Y como una codiciada colección discográfica, todas estas imágenes están ordenadas con sumo cuidado en los muros de la Galería Yvonne Sanguineti. Se trata de una colección que todos querrían tener, al menos a esa conclusión llegué mientras conversaba con mi gran amigo Andreé Ferro, quien me acompañó en esta ocasión; por supuesto, todos los que asistieron a la inauguración quedaron gratamente impresionados: Marcos Palacios, Paola Tejada, Hugo Salazar, Roberto Cores, Akira Chinen, etc.

Es curioso pero a veces me paso una o dos semanas enteras sin comentar ninguna de las muestras a las que he asistido. Y no es por pereza. Simplemente, lo que veo a menudo en diversas galerías limeñas me parece insustancial y de escaso o nulo valor. Esta semana, en cambio, he quedado fascinado con dos exposiciones de primer nivel: la de Hugo Salazar y la de John Chauca. 

Siempre es refrescante observar cómo John aborda el tema de la pintura, y cómo de algún modo establece un juego dialógico con el espectador, en una suerte de transfusión visual que nos sorprende y a la vez nos deja ensimismados. Ahí está el Capitán América (más cercano a la actual versión de la línea Ultimate que al héroe de la década del 30) despojado de su escudo verdadero y portando, en su lugar, una orgullosa escarapela. O a Marilyn Monroe (quizás uno de los más preciados fetiches de John) enterrada entre dos carnosos labios que prometen un apasionado beso.

Basta leer el texto de John Chauca para comprender su nostalgia por los discos de vinilo, y así hayamos vivido en el auge de la época de los tocadiscos o hayamos nacido en la era del mp3, hay algo en la propuesta de John que resuena en nuestro interior. Porque la música, como los latidos del corazón, no puede parar y porque la pasión por el arte debe seguir y seguir… y seguir… como un disco rayado.

Arcadio Bolaños

I don’t believe - Abel Bentín (Galería Lucía de la Puente)

Otto; or, Up With Dead People (2008)
Directed by Bruce La Bruce

Bruce La Bruce's film is a brilliant analysis of contemporary displaced people, individuals who live on the margins of society, groups that struggle to obtain validation of either legal or social nature.

"Otto" is the story of an outcast teenager. Now, there would be nothing original about this except for one detail: In a world in which the living dead are humanity's recurrent plague, Otto is a boy that defines himself as a non flesh-eating zombie with an identity crisis.

From the very beginning, the viewer is aware of a narration inside a narration, in a way that would be comparable to Propst literary models. "Up with Dead People" is the movie that lesbian intellectual Medea is filming, with references to Hélène Cixous views on the essential bisexuality of L'ecriture femenine, as well as Irigaray's Speculum of the other Woman (the mirroring of the female body surmounts feminist theory in this film as Hella, Medea's girlfriend, can only appear on screen as a black and white image from old reels of 1910-1920 movies, thus enabling a parallel between these two women and even classic and contemporary cinema).

In the first scene Otto rises from the grave, a classic image that has transcended the 7th art and has forever become part of popular culture. Ever since Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" (1968) filmmakers have toyed with one of humanity's most fierily rooted fears: death or rather the question "what happens after Death?". Romero and others have also explored the living dead as a metaphor of social marginality and the reification of the subaltern thus creating one of the most fascinating sub-genres in film's history.

my sketch / mi boceto

This film proudly assumes this cultural heritage and builds upon it. As the narrator's voice tell us in the first scenes, these dead people have little or nothing to do with the classic flesh-eating, brain-devouring zombie. Those who are alive judge them as "An echo of their own somnambulistic conformist behavior". Normal society is exposed as a tyrannical Lacanian "Great Other", a Great Other that demands adaptation or extinction. Insofar heterosexual normative is carried out the Great Other is satisfied. The symbolic order, that which constitutes what one would perceive as "reality", can never suppress the "real" (id est, the obstacle of the symbolic order). But the real can only exist after the symbolic order (which relies greatly on language, the widest symbolization process known) has been fully inserted in everyone's mind. Then, it's only logical that zombies are finally able to reclaim language and reasoning. If zombies were the outsiders of past decades, they are now entities that can never fit in and that are constantly aware of their own situation. What can be more destabilizing for the heterosexual normative than homosexuality taken to the extreme?, in this case, a new wave of gay zombies that prey upon male flesh, in a very carnal and literal way.

Otto lives, or unlives, eating animals instead of humans. He runs away from those who would seek to harm him. And he finds a way to define himself thanks to Medea and her movie which is full of theory references. As Medea's brother so aptly confirms, here the subject is "the empty signifier upon which you could project any particular gender".

Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory derives from Levi-Strauss structuralism (after Saussure and Jacobson linguistic studies). They would affirm that certain structures have invariably persisted in humanity's development. One of such structures is the dual nature of language. When Saussure defined langue and parole he decided that the entire language was nothing more than a system of signs, signs that had arbitrary value and that would only have meaning in their relation with other signs. If so, the human language can only exist in a dual system of opposition (signifier / signified: signifier as the acoustic image generated by an idea or object and signified as the word in any given language that is utilized to retrieve that acoustic image from our memory). This fundamental duality has its first manifestation in sexual gender (males versus females). And as Lacan explains, the first structure one encounters as one enters into the world is that of sex, one is either a man or a woman, no one can be both or neither. Or at least that's what heterosexual normative would have us believe. There is no place for a third sex and has never been one, hermaphrodites and other variants have been utterly discarded by psychoanalytic theory.

John Chauca Laurente

Lacan, nonetheless, accepts in his sexuation graphic that being a woman doesn't necessarily mean to occupy the female position or that being a man doesn't necessarily mean to occupy the male position. He also accepts that the male and female positions have evolved through history and adapted to social requirements, being a man or being a woman, as gender affiliated roles, is a sign of arbitrariness, in the sense that there is nothing human that can be defined as a masculine or feminine behavior. Everything is a social construction. And as such is an empty signifier. Gender roles are different now compared to recent centuries, or even decades, and they keep changing. Nothing is set in stone.

Does "Otto" attempt to disrupt the Lacanian structure? Otto has experienced idealized love (indisputably visible in his flashbacks as a living boy), savage and destructive sex with a costumed gay that thinks Otto is disguised as a zombie, and the possibility of a more complete relationship with Fritz, the movie star. He deals with the masculine position in his first love, he assumes sex as the ultimate manifestation of a consumer-based capitalist world (to consume and cannibalize are here synonyms), and finally accepts the failure to insert himself into society (after his brief relationship with Fritz) and wanders towards the north, hoping to find people like him, hoping to find, perhaps, a Utopian gay civilization in which the living and non-living can finally divert their basic and seemingly irreconcilable natures.
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Abel Bentín

El día de ayer se inauguraron cinco interesantísimas muestras de arte en Barranco. Abel Bentín, un artista joven y sumamente talentoso, presentó “I don’t believe” en la Galería Lucía de la Puente. En una muestra anterior, “Candyvore”, Abel había trabajado con figuras como los cráneos de caramelo o la violencia casi sangrienta del fudge con chispitas de caramelo, y se trataba de piezas tan apetecibles que provocaba devorarlas. Ahora, no obstante, las esculturas de Abel nos traen rezagos de la ternura de los animales y la inocencia de los dibujos animados; tenemos, entonces, las manos de Mickey Mouse o el imposible cráneo del Pato Donald.

Simultáneamente, también en Lucía de la Puente, la artista Sandra Gamarra presentó una serie de cuadros que juegan con ciertas estructuras, o desestructuras (también podríamos hablar de deconstrucción aunque la propia artista utiliza el término destrucción), y por ejemplo utiliza el lugar de enunciamiento del artista o juega con originales combinaciones de imágenes realistas en situaciones totalmente irrealistas o hasta surrealistas. Dos muestras maravillosas y dos artistas extraordinarios, aunque lo mejor de la noche, indudablemente, fue la presencia de mi amigo Max, que por fin se animó a asistir a uno de estos eventos.

Abel Bentín

En el transcurso de la noche nos encontramos con bastante gente, varios visitantes asiduos de la galería como Christian Fuchs, Hugo Alegría, Carmen Alegría y José Medina (editor de ArtMotiv) además de artistas como Dare Dovidjenko y Mariella Agois. Luego de las copas de malbec de Navarro Correas y los vasos de Johnnie Walker Black Label, me di cuenta que el sempiterno pisco Ferreyros había sido reemplazado por el nuevo pisco Portón, que por supuesto me animé a probar. También, desde luego, me encontré con amigos de mi colegio como José Aturo Lugón y Rafael Velásquez. Fiel a las siempre atinadas recomendaciones de Rafael, Max y yo decidimos ir a Domingo Laboratorio Creativo, aunque pasamos antes por la Galería Yvonne Sanguineti.

En Yvonne Sanguineti se inauguraban dos muestras, “Al fondo… ¿hay sitio?” de John Chauca Laurente, y Les fleurs du bien de Estrella Levy Gazit. Los cuadros de Chauca, siempre irreverentes, subvierten imágenes icónicas tanto de la historia peruana como del arte universal, así, tenemos a un conocido prócer de la patria saltando de un acantilado, no en el caballo emblemático con el que aparece en todos los libros escolares, sino con una moto; de igual modo, la Mona Lisa tiene el rostro cubierto con el sticker de una carita feliz, y el Hombre de Vitruvio, de Leonardo Da Vinci aparece reinventado.

Sandra Gamarra

En palabras del propio Chauca: “Se dice que la práctica hace al maestro. Yo agregaría: la práctica y mucha observación. Porque: ¿Qué es uno? ¿Un interdenominacional predicador del “Malogrando se Aprende” en cinco lecciones y por correspondencia?,  ¿Un insípido degustador de ideas almacenadas en las papeleras de reciclaje de las memorias del Señor Peter Kam Troupus y para colmo Erectus?, o acaso ¿Un enredador de historias incivilizadas con final feliz, más IGV y romance incluidos? A lo mejor, un sumo pontífice de lo absurdo que reclama para sí los restos fósiles y mancillados de La Oreja de Van Gogh, masterizado en disco de vinilo de 45 R.P.M., o simple y llanamente, un aprendiz de artista -en pleno estado de ebullición- cuya efervescencia rebalsa, incluso, los límites de lo que hasta ahora  ha conocido,  y quien harto de enmudecer ante tanto cuestionamiento irrefutable, solo se permite balbucear: ¡Qué fácil es pintar difícil y qué difícil es pintar fácil!”. Las fotos de Estrella Levy Gazit son, como explica el conocido fotógrafo Piero Pereira “objetos que reflejan o traslucen otros objetos que además se reflejan entre sí”.

En Domingo, Max y yo pudimos pintar con crayolas las innumerables fotocopias de los trabajos de Abel Bentín, y es que como parte de la muestra Sketch, podíamos intervenir libremente un largo corredor completamente tapizado de imágenes de Abel. Mientras pintábamos con la crayolas, como niños chiquitos, Max y yo nos tomamos un par de vasos de vodka, ahí sí como niños grandes, ofrecidos gentilmente tanto por mi amigo Rafael como por Gabriel Lama (Rafael me lo presentó hace años y desde entonces somos amigos), director y promotor de esta innovador espacio cultural. Fue una noche realmente divertida.

Fantasías animadas (de ayer y de hoy) de John Chauca Laurente (Galería Yvonne Sanguineti)

Are British writers superior (at least in the comic book industry)? I’m a big fan of late 70’s and early 80’s 2000 AD stuff, and Moore, Morrison, Wagner, Grant, Milligan and the rest of the gang were just brilliant back then. Diet, geography, tradition, history, sociological development, there could be thousands of possible explanations, but British writers seem to be consistently better than American writers.



Sometimes you don’t even know they’re British. That happened to me with Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning. I remember picking up The Legion # 22, and after a few months I had the entire run, and I kept buying the new issues until the end. I first met the Legion of Super-Heroes through Levitz’s old 80s run, and I loved the idea of the Legion so much that I felt sad after I lost track on it. But I don’t let nostalgia cloud my judgment. Those issues represent good memories, sure. Nevertheless, there is a vast distance separating nostalgia from memories. Memories are good or bad, and that’s it. They hurt us or please us, nothing else. And I believe that we always try to cope with our best memories –a most difficult task–. To remember is something that always depends on our will. Something that is much more linked to the will –will disguised as evocation– that we might consider at first. Once again: memories are good or bad, regular if you wish. The writer can make of them whatever he wants when he creates his masterpiece. Nostalgia, on the contrary, contains the wondrous ability of being totally independent from our will. It is easy, very easy, it is simply a matter of efficient or inefficient memory to remember. It is impossible in contrast to ‘nostalgiate’. Because of the simple reason that there is nothing more independent from our memory than our own nostalgia.

                                                  Cover by Joe Jusko. Full version here:


http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2010/328/8/9/warlord_of_mars_no__5_by_joejusko-d33jifh.jpg


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El miércoles se inauguró la muestra de John Chauca en la Galería Yvonne Sanguineti. Chauca es un artista que mantiene una línea definida, capaz de preservar celosamente una propuesta personal: él es fiel a sus principios artísticos, y su sensibilidad e ideas se ven ingeniosamente plasmadas en sus cuadros. Ver un cuadro de Chauca significa reconocerlo de inmediato, nadie más trabaja con los pinceles ni con el acrílico de la misma manera que él. Y eso, por sencillo que parezca, la huella del creador, es una de las cosas más difíciles de conseguir.


Además de encontrarme con el artista Roberto Cores, me quedé conversando con Marcos Palacios y Paola Tejada, y al final de la noche, nos fuimos con Chauca, Iván Fernández-Dávila y algunos más al Círculo de Barranco. Allí nos quedamos conversando y tomando hasta tarde, yo fui el primero en retirarme a eso de la una y media de la mañana (para poder llegar a tiempo a mi almuerzo con Brian Power al día siguiente). Conversar con Chauca cara a cara permite corroborar lo que ya sospechaba, se trata de un artista luchador, perseverante, que sería capaz de sobrevivir sin galerías o premios importantes (y vale señalar que él ha empezado a trabajar con galerías de peso hace un par de años y ha ganado premios muy importantes). Y esa fuerza, esa independencia, se nota en su trabajo. Quizá por ello, cada vez con más frecuencia, el éxito empieza a coquetear con él.


http://www.limagris.com/?p=4230

Y finalmente un dibujo mío con estilógrafo: