Escorzos - Ricardo Cassinelli (Corriente Alterna)

Eugenio Raborg

You can be absent, and yet in a way you are with me. Someone can exist in our memory and in the possibility of their return. If there is no one around you it doesn’t mean that you are necessarily alone. Solitude is, in fact, an incomplete and unique way of living in this world. Ancient myths have tried to explain this situation. Human beings are devoured by love because of the immense necessity of finding a mythic original unit. You try to find someone else as if you were searching for a lost part of your own body; and you are in pain if you do not find that part. Loneliness has a very tight bond with communication; we are forced to communicate, even when we don’t want or can’t communicate with other people. However, we have the conviction of someone else’s existence and we are aware of how much do we need that person. Inside of us, in our intimate conviction of someone else’s existence and in our painful experience of his absence, therein lies the sentiment of solitude. To become alone it is mandatory wanting to be two, at least, or having been two and preserving the respective nostalgia.

There can be three different categories of loneliness. The first one is the result of the death of a very dear friend or relative. Something you are familiar with. The second category consists in organizing the other’s absence, we exist because he is looking at us, but we have no control over his eyes or his presence. Our existence depends on the other person, jeopardizing our own independence. Then fear forces us to run away from the other, to forget him, in an attempt of regaining control of the situation. We disappear to make the other one disappear. We rush into loneliness because we are so afraid of being alone. We surrender to solitude, and there is always the risk of getting used to it.  The third category is idealization; the other one exists because of us, and we see in him what we wish to see, we project intuitions, ideas and illusions; we create an imaginary being. But what happens when the other one shatters our fantasies? We walk away and we find out that we were always alone, since the very beginning. Reality doesn’t meet our expectations and therefore we become lonely beings. A totally happy solitude is impossible, however, in a mature way loneliness can be something positive. It is a learning path that allow us to accept our frustration and also to get rid of obsessive socializing with others. We have to find the balance, we have to feel comfortable when we are lonely if we want to feel comfortable with someone else. 

my sketch / mi boceto

A French author, Hannon, in his book ‘Nos solitudes’, has some interesting insights. Loneliness can be an ambiguous notion, we all get to be lonely every now and then; but at the same time the idea of remaining alone is unsettling and frightening. In the past, you had to seclude from the rest of the population to be alone. Hermits or poets were socially allowed to be alone. Today you can be lonely even if you are surrounded by people. The crowd that surrounds a lonely man is like a mirror that reflects his condition. ‘Multitude, solitude, similar and convertible terms’ said Baudelaire once. In the past, at least, a lonely figure could be respected but now a lonely figure is considered suspicious or undesirable. Pascal said about the human being: ‘description of men: dependency, desire of independency, necessity’. We are authors and victims of our own loneliness. I need someone else but I behave as if I could live without that person. So, loneliness is associated with the idea of isolation and disgrace. And more often it is deemed as the cause and not the consequence of an existential problem.
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Ricardo Cassinelli

El día de ayer el gran Max Maradiegue tuvo la buena voluntad de acompañarme a la presentación del libro del Británico sobre la obra –siempre irónica, juguetona, llena de referencias y homenajes a los más importantes artistas occidentales– de Eugenio Raborg. 

Al final, luego de un par de copitas de vino, terminamos cenando en La 73 –paradero gourmet– y luego de una rica entrada, un buen lomo quinoto y un maracuyá sour, pudimos conversar sobre diversos temas y ponernos al día, después de todo, no nos veíamos desde hacía casi tres meses. Como siempre, fue un gusto compartir un momento tan agradable.

Hoy en la noche, asistí a dos muestras, una en Miraflores y otra en Barranco. En Corriente Alterna se inauguraba “Escorzos” de Ricardo Cassinelli, una propuesta que juega con nuestra mirada y con el concepto de perpendicularidad que, de un modo u otro, limita nuestro campo de visión. 

Según el curador Gustavo Buntinx, Cassinelli hace alusión a la sociedad limeña desde una óptica inclinada, incompleta, inicua que a su vez retrata las diferencias sociales que parecen caracterizar nuestra ciudad. En esta ocasión me encontré con mi buen amigo Andreé Ferro, y también conversé con David Rejas y Christian Fuchs, con quien no coincidía desde hacía un par de meses.

De inmediato, Andreé y yo nos dirigimos a Dédalo, donde se inauguraba “A tomar el té”, nueva línea de muebles de la extraordinaria artista Ana Teresa Barboza, que centra sus diseños en la reutilización y el reciclaje de elementos que muchos considerarían inservibles. Allí me encontré con Pedro Casusol, saludé a Eduardo Lores y a María Elena Fernández, y también charlé brevemente con Carmen Alegre e Isabelle Decencière. 

Diálogos visuales - Cynthia Capriata (Dédalo)

my drawing + my signature / mi dibujo + mi firma

I jumped aboard Runaways in the middle of the second series. I wanted to get the whole first series in individual issues but it wasn’t so easy for me in those days, when I was just learning how to buy stuff online. Then in 2007 I decided to buy the first three digests (they were irresistibly cheap). 

Back then I didn’t know where to find back issues of Runways (first series), so I thought what the hell, I’ll buy the three digests which cost me, if I recall correctly, 3.99 bucks each (except the third one which was 4.79). So for 12 bucks I read 18 issues of BKV goodness.

Of course, I had always heard good things about Brian K. Vaughan; in 2007 I was still waiting for him to finish his run on Y the Last Man to buy it all at once. Anyway, something I especially enjoyed in the first Runaways issue was the way Vaughan introduced the characters: they are a group of kids you can really relate to and that are probably going to remind you of somebody you know in real life. 

I liked Chase from the beginning, he’s always been one of my favorites. I always remember him saying “please let it be beer”, I thought that could be me saying “please let it be whisky, let it be whisky”; I loved the humor and all the jokes. I absolutely loved Runaways. And I know one day I must review all of it. 
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Cynthia Capriata es la primera artista en exponer en Dédalo este 2013, su muestra titulada "Diálogos visuales: 80 Ganeshas" estuvo muy concurrida e incluso atrajo la atención de las cámaras de Polizontes, divertido programa de Plus TV. Capriata rescata los mandalas y recurre a la figura de Ganesha, el dios elefante hindú, para crear imágenes muy sugerentes, en las que combina diversas técnicas: acuarela, crayón, óleo, etc. Sin duda, un colorido festín visual que nos recuerda la esencia de la India.  

Aunque con algunos minutos de atraso, igual llegué a tiempo para encontrarme con Max Maradiegue, y en el transcurso de la noche saludamos y hablamos brevemente con María Elena Fernández, Eduardo Lores, Paola Tejada y Marcos Palacios, y también conversamos sobre literatura beatnik y redes sociales con Pedro Casusol y Sebastián Lores. Creo que esta ha sido una de las pocas veces en que tomé casi la misma cantidad de chilcanos que Max, y es que yo tenía una importante cita en la revista COSAS al día siguiente. 

De todos modos, eso no nos impidió pasar una noche muy divertida, que se prolongó no hasta altas horas de la madrugada pero sí, casi, hasta altas horas de la medianoche. Sin duda, el momento más ameno de la semana.

La muestra permanecerá abierta al público durante hasta fines de mes, les recomiendo que se den una vuelta por Dédalo y la vean.

Reverso - Centro Colich (Barranco)

“Los colosos custodios de un rey ficticio”- Hugo Salazar

Here is a question that has vexed me of late: what really constitutes an act of creation?

I have -for a couple of years now- been acknowledged as the creator of quite entertaining tales, if I do say so myself… but I've often wondered, just how "creative" was my process. How do I assemble my little cast of characters, the situations, the emotions and all of it together? You see, since I was child I always loved to write things, it doesn’t matter if at the end they didn’t make much sense, it was fun every step of the way.

Now, to have a relationship could be compared to an act of creation. I was thinking about this after reading Constantino Carvallo’s book. Definitely, that book is forcing me to analyze myself… and as a direct result of such confrontation, I end up almost buried under a ton of philosophical sentences.

True communication and friendship can also be considered as a true act of creation. When I was still studying Literature in my university, I had an optional class that was supposed to teach me how to write. I remember my first work… my teacher said that my short story wasn’t excellent but it sure had some brilliant moments. So there I was, wondering if my short story was an act of creation that should set an example or quite the opposite. I was genuinely speechless. When someone (a student I can’t remember now) asked me who my greatest influences were, I found that hard to answer. And I mean it. Even something I hate with a passion which surpasses understanding is an influence, since I will be consciously attempting not to do that.

my drawing / mi dibujo

Back on track: I've said before that I don't think there are any original stories left to tell. All we can do is fiddle the trappings a bit and, one hopes, in the process create something that will at least have the illusion of being new and different.

A true act of creation should be, obviously, indubitably, unquestionably, an act in which we use all our energies in a crazy attempt communicating something that is relevant to us -it’s just like solving an existential problem- or, why not, to get to know somebody, to create an open and long lasting relationship with another human being, a human being that deep down has the same fears, uncertainties and desires as we do. Perhaps this is the most human act we are capable of... I don’t know, but finally I started to think that if instead of spending so much time reading and writing would it have been better to spend it in, say, doing something else entirely?
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Ayer martes se inauguraron simultáneamente cinco muestras en el Centro Colich. Andrea Gago exhibió sus “Carpetas de dibujo”, deliciosas ilustraciones muy imaginativas hechas, algunas, con tinta china, y otras con colores pastel. Luego Giancarlo León Waller presentó “Placas”, un interesante trabajo que juega con procesos fotoquímicos, siempre desde una óptica un tanto lúgubre pero no por ello menos atrayente. Luna Moreno compartió su colección primavera-verano 2013, con prendas de muy buen corte y una presentación de lujo. El artista Gianfranco Piccone Sánchez Concha expuso “Fractales andinos”, con cuadros que se dividían en tres secciones, cada una con un estilo de pintura particular. Finalmente, tenemos a “Reverso”, sin duda, lo mejor de la noche: una selección fascinante de objetos hechos con cartón corrugado, en donde la sofisticación del diseño y el aspecto lúdico de los mismos los convierte en piezas únicas que todos desearían coleccionar. 

En esta ocasión tuve la suerte de contar con la compañía de Max (a quien pueden leer en “Palabras libres y más”). Nos entretuvimos analizando los títulos de piezas como “Estado líquido”, y dicho sea de paso, lo que no faltó fue el líquido. Además de vino tinto, los infaltables chilcanos del pisco Hijo del Sol no se hicieron esperar. Saludé a Carmen Alegre, que siempre se acuerda de Max desde nuestra visita a Lucía de la Puente en marzo, hablé brevemente con Iván Fernández Dávila y Elizabeth López Avilés, quienes me presentaron a Giancarlo León Waller. 

También saludé a Hugo Alegre, a Julio Garay, a Isabelle Decencière, a Adriana Urrutia, a José Arturo Lugón, a Lorenzo Osores y a Lothar Busse, el director del Centro Colich. Mientras conversaba con Max sobre la obra de Séneca y sus tres libros sobre la ira (que por cierto todavía no he tenido la oportunidad de leer), saludamos a Rafael Velázquez, a José Medina y a Marcos Palacios. En el transcurso de la noche conversé con Noah Alhalel, Daniel Velázquez (uno de los artífices de Reverso, y no debemos olvidar el lema de la marca: “un mundo nuevo, un mundo divertido… un mundo reverso”). Después de recorrer los cinco espacios en los que se exponían las distintas muestras, Max y yo nos quedamos conversando un rato con Marcos Palacios. Sin duda fue una noche muy entretenida, y muy memorable por diversos motivos, entre ellas la escala que realizamos Max y yo en la sección de joyería del Centro Colich. 

Aunque, claro, tampoco debemos olvidar nuestro momento estelar junto a Jesús Alzamora, conductor de polizonte, quien nos entrevistó brevemente y con un muy buen sentido del humor (a mí me preguntó qué poder tendría un súper-héroe de mi creación y yo respondí, con la mejor de las intenciones “un hígado de hierro”, y otra de sus preguntas, basándose en mi nombre, fue ¿en qué año ganó el Nobel García Márquez?, en 1982, fue mi respuesta… imposible olvidar la fecha, son dos años antes de que yo naciera). Quizás el próximo jueves, cuando se sienten a ver Polizontes, me encuentren a mí disertando sobre los hígados heroicos y a Max haciendo imprescindibles aclaraciones sobre sus similitudes con el héroe que yo debería ya haber inventado. 

Por cierto, para los que quieran ver más cuadros del genial artista Hugo Salazar los invito a visitar el siguiente link.

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.