I've thought about it a lot. Approximately 240 inflated figures, wood, plaster, clothes, weapon, air and fantasy. Variable dimensions. 2012. Tajamar Gallery, Santiago.
The building I live in is in turn inhabited by a great many people. It is 120 flats spread out over 21 floors. I figure we must be around 240 people. Each one of my neighbours has the capacity to make me deduct imaginatively (probably not very precisely) the forms of their intimacy: the way in which they decorate the spaces they inhabit (which for that matter are proportionally equivalent to the space I myself live in), their customs, routines and tastes, in fact the qualities that make them individuals. Of all my neighbours and the correlations evoked by their bodies, there is only one of whom I suspect terrible things. The fantasy that I cannot help picturing in my mind each time I see him is sordid. I imagine his intimate space as that of a psychopath. I see his room as dark spaces with yellowing walls, newspapers as wallpaper on the walls, bookshelves full of old books, newspaper clippings filling the walls and perverse objects.
Sometimes I catch myself thinking that it is only a matter of time until someone discovers that he co-habits with a cadaver and his apocalyptic manuscripts and plans for world domination. My suspicion is grounded on the assumption of an anomaly or a possible violation of what for me is a healthy notion of what is normal. In a context of reality this suspicion is troubling, not so in connection with art.
In a way, art is a field in which suspicion is domesticated and works in function of the uncanny and for this reason fosters reflection.
In a way, art is a field in which suspicion is domesticated and works in function of the uncanny and for this reason fosters reflection.
In “I have thought about it many times (again)” by Cristián Salineros F., what we will find at Galería Tajamar is a character of which the only thing we can see, under a cloud of inflatable toys, are his legs and a hand that pops out, holding a gun. This character, which had already stayed the night at Galeria 713 Arte Contemporáneo, Buenos Aires, is now assembled. On that occasion I also wrote a text about this sculpture, only now the fantasist narrations it awakens in me are the opposite. If before they were all about happiness, the character no awakens in me disturbing situations of imminent violence. His gun ends up by configuring the profile of a character that is both desperate and hopeless, even if his torso is submerged in the colourful cloud. I must confess that I have enjoyed very much the position of spectator of this particular piece that I have been placed in connection with the writing of the texts he has commissioned from me. I don’t know very well what his opinion is, but from my point of view, I have seen two moments in the history of this slow-moving character and I read them as vignettes in a comic strip: The story of an (apparently) happy man who now pulls out a gun.
I wait expectantly for him to call me again to narrate a third gesture by this character that I still cannot decipher but of whom I suspect. I suspect of him something very similar to what I assume about my neighbour and funnily enough, I feel that the unravelling of both stories is now inextricably linked. Probably they are one and the same person.
Text by Javier González Pesce
Photo Credits: Sebastián Mejias