Aldo Chaparro
22 Apr - 24 May 2008
ALDO CHAPARRO
"It must be nice to disappear."
Disappearance as a possibility for the future, as atonement for a progress without return: this is the sentiment that permeates Vanishing Act, the Lou Reed song from which Aldo Chaparro (Lima, Peru 1965) derives the name of his current exhibit. The sentiment similarly permeates the approach Chaparro takes in his work as an artist, as he constantly tries to erase the borders traditionally imposed between disciplines, and to generate a discourse by juxtaposing external elements with the values intrinsic to art.
Pop music, neon advertisements, posters, Robert Indiana's iconic piece: all shape our imaginary and our memory. Chaparro resorts to these fragments the better to express an identity warehoused within the feelings and unmediated reactions they awake in us. As a gesture that could be understood in relation to the Bergsonian concept of memory – in the sense of perceptual movement that translates pure memory into definite action – the activation of these disciplines, of these various cultural referents, is like that first unconscious memory in which everything floats by, impossible to distinguish, until individual images come into focus, becoming clear before our eyes.
This movement – which begins with general perception and its division into elements, and arrives ultimately at a definitive act of selection congruent with the terms of discourse – is the distinctive characteristic of Aldo Chaparro's work, which seeks to give new meaning to the cultural events that immerse us in the sea of information of everyday life.
"It must be nice to disappear."
Disappearance as a possibility for the future, as atonement for a progress without return: this is the sentiment that permeates Vanishing Act, the Lou Reed song from which Aldo Chaparro (Lima, Peru 1965) derives the name of his current exhibit. The sentiment similarly permeates the approach Chaparro takes in his work as an artist, as he constantly tries to erase the borders traditionally imposed between disciplines, and to generate a discourse by juxtaposing external elements with the values intrinsic to art.
Pop music, neon advertisements, posters, Robert Indiana's iconic piece: all shape our imaginary and our memory. Chaparro resorts to these fragments the better to express an identity warehoused within the feelings and unmediated reactions they awake in us. As a gesture that could be understood in relation to the Bergsonian concept of memory – in the sense of perceptual movement that translates pure memory into definite action – the activation of these disciplines, of these various cultural referents, is like that first unconscious memory in which everything floats by, impossible to distinguish, until individual images come into focus, becoming clear before our eyes.
This movement – which begins with general perception and its division into elements, and arrives ultimately at a definitive act of selection congruent with the terms of discourse – is the distinctive characteristic of Aldo Chaparro's work, which seeks to give new meaning to the cultural events that immerse us in the sea of information of everyday life.