Fig. 1.
Étienne-Jules Marey, Fusil photographique,
1882.
images, superimposed, piled up, and therefore opaque. They no longer live in their little
apartments, officially price protected, but in a common kitchen, a living room or bedroom,
a space so dense, so promiscuous that living together becomes really difficult.
This accumulation of images dissimilar in depth , technically stereometric but
aesthetically perverse, also started his little modern genealogy, from multiple exhibitions
of futurist and surrealist photographs that have always been interpreted from the stance
of time instead of depth, to Jean Dubufett’s superimposed graffiti , the accumulations of
the Nouveaux Réalistes in the 1960s, the storehouses of machines and all kinds of things
collected by Peter Phillips in the 1970s and 1980s, to end up, for better or for worse,
in the post-modern proposal of David Salle and other artists of his generation on both
sides of the Atlantic. And yet the fascination for confusion, illegibility, the added value
of difficulty, is never exhausted and artists of today like Ricardo González García have
recovered it, no doubt with the healthy intention of making it even more illegible, so that
the eclipse keeps on shedding its black light.
As the reader will no doubt imagine, this whole matter of glazing (or drawing
a thick veil over something) and transparencies (everything visible, Albertini’s parete di
vetro ), hold an evident political meaning. In some texts RGG insinuates that he uses
images from the mass media – explicit and direct, shocking – and blurs them with the
idea of Art and techniques of painting. This is not entirely new: think for a moment
of Andy Warhol’s car disasters and race riots, possibly the images that best and most
directly confirm that poetry could exist after Auschwitz. And yet RGG, in the period of
the implosion of reality, goes even further and stops working in the dialectics of beauty/
catastrophe in order to approach a more perverse or more moderate concept, I still
don’t know which: using the idea of art and painting techniques as a procedure for
estrangement, in other words, when the process of confusion touches not only the
images but also the actual procedure and construction of the picture. The idea of the
eclipse, not just as unexpected darkness, but also as a mechanism of superimposition
or interposition: the blurring machinery. In the series Antisouvenirs he uses war images
from current or recent conflicts, painted photographs of explicit pain and destruction, but
then he covers them or glazes them – just as the genitals on holy statues are covered
with a vine-leaf or veiled at Easter – with the rhetoric of painting and the procedures of
art, showing once again that poetry consists of concealing everything so that it can be
seen in a different light.
The question is earlier, at least five years earlier, when he painted Desarticulación,
La depuración del error y Detención (Disarticulation, The purification of error and Arrest ),
pieces which the artist has recovered for this exhibition in Santander. For these pictures
RGG took images of conflicts and conceptually ground them, in his own words “forcing
them through the sieve of painting to empty them of meaning”. It is quite clear: when
we grind something what we obtain is a mass or broth that has no shape at all but which
maintains the dietary taste and properties of the ingredients. Picasso and Warhol cook
on a grill – they flip the food over, they are solid food chefs – while RGG, armed with his
image mixer, limits us to a liquid diet, as if we were recovering from infoxication 4 .
In this regard, by hiding or concealing the political after the art effect, RGG is
something quite different from what we normally understand as a politically committed
artist. And so these images about Iraq, Libya and Nigeria are something like concealed
or deactivated Guernicas.
It is well-known that Barthes related photography to death. He liked the word
spectrum , because he saw its double etymology: as a show, bright and open, but to
which, nevertheless, “we could add something terrible that exists in photographs: the
return of the dead”. E. J. Marey’s rifle, where Barthes refuses to linger, is the most direct
image of this relationship between photography and disappearance 5 . (Fig. 1 y 2) This is
what I believed until I discovered Japanese attack on USS Enterprise, 1942, a photograph
that shows the explosion that killed the photographer, Robert Frederick. Death shots from
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The neologism infoxication , an acronym from intoxication of information, was coined by Alfons
Cornella to allude to the over-saturation of information in cognitive capitalism.
4
5 Cf. Francisco Javier San Martín, “Turbulencias en la cámara”, in the catalogue Pintura de cámara,
Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea (San Sebastián, 2002), pp. 33-35.