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Víctor Guédez Caracas
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Jose F. Grave de Peralta. Miami
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Trina Collins Miami
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Dominique Nahas New York
Los casos de
las cosas de Ani Villanueva
Por: Víctor
Guédez
El lugar de privilegio y el tiempo de vigencia que Marcel Duchamp estableció para el objeto desde 1.913 no han dejado de prolongarse a lo largo del arte contemporáneo. Han cambiado las intenciones y resoluciones, las escalas y recursos, los orígenes y propósitos, pero el objeto sigue manteniendo su potencialidad generativa como foco de las especulaciones estéticas más abiertas y de los expedientes investigativos más sorpresivos. Lo hecho, lo encontrado, lo intervenido, lo buscado y lo ensamblado han sido algunas de las técnicas que han pautado el despliegue de los planteamientos artísticos centrados en el objeto. Este registro diversificado de posibilidades ha reducido los nichos de especulación creativa y, en consecuencia, ha mermado los márgenes de aporte de quienes lo abordan. En el orden de este desafío se coloca, precisamente, el trabajo que ahora nos presenta Ani Villanueva.
Con los antecedentes consanguíneos derivados de ser nieta de Federico Brandt e hija de Mary Brandt, así como con la experiencia previa de haber cultivado el “performance” en los ochenta, al igual que el video-arte, la danza contemporánea y la pintura durante los últimos años, ahora la artista nos sorprende con un universo de utensilios reordenados y redimensionados de tal manera que puedan decir lo que antes no podían decir y de que puedan contar sus propios casos.
Esa presencia de objetos acoplados con sospechosas perfecciones, conjugados con calculadas geometrías y dispuestos para revelar fantasías, caprichos y delirios, nos remite a una ecología plástica a partir del plástico y a un registro orgánico a partir de lo inorgánico. En este conjunto lo reconocido se integra a lo extraño y lo lúdico se convierte en subversión perceptiva. Aquí la irracionalidad de un utensilio se racionaliza mediante un ejercicio compositivo para volverse a convertir en irracionalidad metafórica. En el marco de esta dinámica de irracionalidad – racionalidad – irracionalidad operan insumos intuitivos desde la inicial localización de los utensilios hasta en la consecución de las inesperadas sugerencias.
La exigencia del planteamiento aumenta debido a la presencia de elementos pequeños y livianos, propios de la sociedad de rápido consumo. Después de ser ensamblados, estos objetos adquieren un aura de energía sutil y un total desarraigo de sus orígenes. Tal apogeo se asocia con la seducción de unas apariencias que remiten a cualquier realidad distinta a su “cosidad” prístina . No se trata de objetos melancólicos recuperados de la memoria ni recontextualizados con nostalgias. Tampoco se presiente el énfasis en un fetiche ni la arrogancia de un recurso de escala efectista. Más bien son objetos capturados con la impronta de un encuentro espontáneo y desproblematizado. Así se origina una inspiración lúdica que alcanza que aquello que sólo se usa sin ser visto sea, finalmente, visto sin ser usado y que, sobre todo, sea percibido sin ser fácilmente reconocido. La soberanía de lo insignificante se administra aquí en un espacio pendular que conjuga la trivialidad del objeto original con la extraña prepotencia de sus adulteraciones. De esta manera, los resultados se concentran en una alternancia entre la simulación y la disimulación. Podríamos decir, con palabras de Jean Baudrillard, que “para hablar de simulación, se requiere que el objeto se ría del sentido sin dejar de ser completamente verdadero”. Asimismo, podría añadirse que, para pensar en la disimulación se precisa precipitar las cosas más allá de su propia existencia y por encima de sus inocentes usos. Sólo por esta vía se favorece el circuito entre simulación – disimulación – seducción.
Con base en ese circuito, la artista promueve que los objetos renieguen de su condición de objetos para reivindicar la connotación de otros significados. Estos responden a revelaciones sugerentes: fondos marinos, corales, bacterias, medusas, insectos, en fin, surge una ecología orgánica de ironía refrescante. Cada pieza demuestra que lo que la artista quiere mostrarnos es un objeto transformado por la integración con otros objetos que obedecen a una idea de modularidad y fragmentación. Módulos que se reiteran y acoplan, así como fragmentos que expresan una totalización. Es así como cada resolución termina representando el testimonio de un hallazgo y la celebración de una redimensión. En definitiva, aquí el artificio y la astucia se convierten en las competencias clave para legitimar la premisa Hegeliana: las cosas se transforman para mantenerse de otra manera.
Para alcanzar estos propósitos, Ani Villanueva asume su esfuerzo como diversión, más que como una presión. El sólo título de su serie “Casos de cosas”, podría remitirnos a una intención conceptual, pero quizá lo que en el fondo opera es algo diferente: más que subrayar la densidad de un concepto, lo que la artista busca, quizá sin saberlo, sea enfatizar la desconceptualización del arte. O mejor dicho: buscar la conceptualización del arte a partir de su desconceptualización.
"I'd give anything to cover an entire wall with one of these 'Hairies' - but in monumental proportions!"
Sun Sentinel- Jose F. Grave de Peralta.
Among "Garlands"by Trina Collins |
Entering Carly Aguilera's South Art gallery to see Ani Villanueva's “Garlands” was a relax-and-enjoy kind of experience. First, there was the scent of sage, wafting up through the floorboards. Then there were the flowers - digital photographs, shot in Nepal, of brilliant orange marigolds and purple bougainvillea. And there was the music. And the fact that we were asked to take off our shoes before entering. It all made for a meditative environment. Scattered around the floor were numerous digital photos of burning incense encased in plastic disks. On a recent evening, a figure was seated in the center of the room, covered in a shroud - the shroud, too, imprinted with photographs of burning incense. The lone figure, of course, was Villanueva meditating. And, you know what, I felt like meditating with her. That's not the sort of feeling I generally get while gallery hopping with friends, dressed to the nines, who plan to cap off a Saturday night dancing at Bongo's. What was this strange urge to meld with the universe instead of joining the spike-heeled, black-garbed, semi-sophisticates in the non-conversations that usually take place around the fringes of gallery hopping nights? Villanueva had created a combination of sacred and public space. Her shrouded, meditating, Buddha-like figure set the tone. Curiously, not everyone in attendance realized there was a human being under the sheet, although just about everyone, after entering and looking at what was on the walls, seemed drawn by Villanueva's gravitational pull and orbited slowly around her, spiraling closer and closer. Was this boring? Well, of course it was boring, and with a capital B. I come from a tradition of performance art centered on political protest - human rights, sexual identity, the whole deal. So I was a little nonplussed to encounter no movement, no nothing. I saw absolutely nothing I expected to see. And yet, something important seemed to be going on. For starters, here was a performer with the courage to do the unthinkable - nothing. When I walked into South Art, the vibrations, the music, the simplicity of it all made me want to lie back against the wall, skip Bongo's, close my eyes and meditate with the flowers In short, reality shifted. And that's no small thing. Trina Collins is an artist and a regular conributor to the Miami Art Exchange. |
Ani Villanueva by Dominique Nahas - New York 1999.
John Dewey claimed that one of the tasks of art is that of clarifying and concentrated meanings contained in scattered and weakened ways in the materials of other experiences. Ani Villanueva uses her painterly vision as a focusing device to bring into play an experiential quality which includes a variety of associational possibilities. These multiple readings are purposely drenched in positive ambiguity which lends the work a heightened sense of expressiveness which is fueled with an economy of mean and clarity of purpose.
Villanueva's art is seen as an experience in which patterns of blue dots against red in Coney, the brown gray biomorphic forms against speckled brick background in Aroa Lobster I , the meandering blue and black dots and lines against dappled grey in File Fish I and II, and the iridescent interplay between red and black organisms in Yellowfin Grouper, seem to float and hover at close range, dreamlike in front of the viewer.;
Through such works the artist shows a naturalist's talent to exploit on the structures of nature's metamorphic identity. The interplay between part and whole, between artificial and naturalistic, between the micro and macroscopic,the internal and external readings are the hinge points upon which the artist's artworks depend. It's in this elasticity and mutability of forms that Villanueva expresses her "total reaction to life", to use the words Henry James uses in describing the sacral reverence toward the beauty of creation.
What are we to make of these patterns and marks, arrested in time and space and presented as spectral markings and biomorphic trails? Reading on one hand as biological or naturalistic patterns they are also registered in the mind as a formal exercise in associative imagery and as well as referring to a play of synecdoche in which parts of a larger unseen picture create visual drama and surprise. The artist's work, then, is of a doubled world both strangely familiar and otherworldly that finds its aesthetic ancestors in Klee, Matisse, Guston.
If we were to categorize Villanueva's impulses consisting of strokes and splotches of high key color we might say her motifs have serendipitous resonance to real biologic forms or patterns in nature that assert themselves with keen intensity. This intensity is at the core of the artist's transcendent vision of including a dialogue woven of contradictory but mutually inclusive enigmas.
"The marine immensity and its depth are trapped by her bidemensional work which invites us to share her personal aquarium and its secrets, only revealed to the sensitive eye… Her fish are "alive and flapping their tails" she attempts to share her underwater discoveries…Neither a naturalist painter nor an illustrator; she recreates her own schools, her own species, her mermaid mythologies, her marine Gods, fascinating animal shapes and characters dwell in her canvasses, as if they had always belonged there…. She paints with the most traditional technique: oil, because it allows her the enjoyment of time in her work, and the dilation of the gesture on the canvas…Her paintings are a fishhook, which she now throws to the observer.
Moraima Guanipa, Art Journalist, El Universal, Caracas, Venezuela.
These are paintings to observe and feel headless…. An impulse from beyond directs her traces and shapes… A strength which kills pretexts and persuasive banality. Her images portray her own experiences…. In her paintings the freedom opposed to stereotypes and doctrinaire dogmas is aspired…It is alloying creativity expressed in all the canvas with very uninhibited pigments…Hazardous combinations rule the form and its idea…The concept is neutralized concept, or even better serene. The ‘natural being prevails’…
Felipe Marquez, Art Critic, El Universal, Caracas, Venezuela.
Airs of freshness and simplicity, Ani Villanueva, a polifacetic character, controversial, marked by an inherited artistic vein, part of a solid tradition of painters, loaded with an immense baggage of experiences and knowledge acquired in her multiple travels around the world, she presents today a series of canvases the, the latest product of her imagination
Economia Hoy, Caracas
"….Many will wonder why after having being a conceptual artist, a performing artist, now I use such simple elements, close to our daily life: a fish, a fish exists….why fish?…well they touch our unconscious as a reference of freedom."
Interview by Ana Maria Hernandez. Journalist from El Globo. Caracas, Venezuela.
…. Figures of elemental but highly expressive plasticity, give back to us the gracefulness of that versant in which nature offers itself not so much as a place within which to recollect life, but rather as a symbol of a possible fulfillment of life itself in its accomplished plenitude. Her paintings composed with a sense of duty to the authenticity of creative matter itself, are documents, annotations, and a diarist symptom of restricted paradises and exclusive visions.
…Each work exhales a sort of underground need to maintain an anchorage on objective truth. The jungle tints with fugacious vibrations the greenish shadows of dawn when the vertical light explodes. The hour may be intuited in each painting. Ani Villanueva stages a feeling of total solution of thought, which lets fluctuate in the vastness of the sea and sky, of superior life and of the fantastic overcoming through essential and deprived lines."
Gladys Marcotulli. Artist and Art Critic. South Seasons Project.
"….Artist like Ani Villanueva sustain their position with humor and irony".
"Guayana a Way of thinking" Roberto Guevara. Art Critic. El Nacional, Caracas, Venezuela.
