Federico Guzmán
11 Jan - 22 Feb 2014
FEDERICO GUZMÁN
Territorio liberado
11 January – 22 February 2014
The works in Federico Guzmán’s exhibition Liberated Territory continue his 25-year exploration into defining and dismantling the artificial constructs that shape our personal and political identity. In surveying the works displayed here, we see new incarnations of familiar territory: spirals, circles, the gradated spectrum of the color wheel, and images glowing with an effervescent light so white-hot they could cut through steel. Combined, these motifs express his desire to break down the walls that constrain our freedoms.
A painting like Ignis Novus, expresses ideas that Federico and I discussed when becoming friends in the late 1980s. We were both preoccupied with the art and writing of Robert Smithson, and especially enamored by his slide lecture Hotel Palenque and the iconic Spiral Jetty. Energy. Vortexes. Entropy. Negentropy (negating entropy). Life. Death. Smithson explored the inefable universe in which everything decays and destruction is creation.
At the time, Federico often employed the spiral as a way to deconstruct, unwind and blur the distinctions between individual and state; placing the self in opposition to a socially constructed identity. I remember an early work “Psicoprovincia, “ (1989) in which he painted a large spiral (its length determined by his passport number) that emanated from the soles of his feet outward to cover most of his studio floor. What engages me about this work is that the spiral is a shape that extends inwardly and outwardly toward infinity. It is a concrete expression of the unlimited potential of freedom.
A year later, when reviewing Federico’s first solo exhibition in New York for Artforum, (September 1990), I focused primarily on his obliteration of geographic logic. One of the exhibition’s seminal works, “Las Fronteras Espirales,” was constructed from individual rubber silhouettes of the world’s countries cut into continuous strips that coiled inward toward the nation’s center. Unfurled and scattered haphazardly across the floor, they could no longer be read cartographically. This work was then used to create “Cuadro de las Fronteras Espirales,” by dipping the rubber strips in purple paint and imprinting their amorphous shape onto a rectangular canvas. With the geographic boundaries disintegrated into a decorative mass, the pictorial result was more Jackson Pollock than Map of the World. Stamping all four sides of the canvas with the letters “NSEO,” the world map merged into a single unified, but directionless field. The intertwined entanglement of cultural boundaries suggested the arbitrariness of geographic constructs by reducing the political boundaries of country-states into an amorphous mesh of meaninglessness.
Federico Guzmán’s art consistently explores the oppression created by socially imposed boundaries and the human desire for freedom and autonomy. For Paradise Europe, (BizArt, Copenhagen, 1992), an exhibition of commissioned public billboards installed throughout Denmark, Guzmán produced “Casualidades de la arqueología,” an expansive plane filled with two enlarged sheets of press-type displaying various “decorative borders.”
While the idea that political borders are artificial constructs was not new at the time (I’m thinking of Marcel Broodthaers’s Carte Du Monde Poetique (1968) which was created by substituting the LI of Politique, with an E so that it reads Poetique), its relevance gets perpetually renewed. Paradise Europe opened in 1992, a year full of celebrations (and anti-celebrations) of “Columbus’ Discovery of the New World.” This is also the year when the European Union was being formed, and with it the vague promise of Europe dismantling its borders. In this context, Federico’s oversized decorative border patterns suggest that borders are decorative, artificial. They are abstractions imposed upon a reality that it tries to suppress, and make invisible, so that it can create and control an alternative reality that is ultimately a lie.
The spiral is again referenced in Federico’s circular portrait of the Talja, a tree of resistance that survives in the extreme heat and waterless conditions of the desert. We gaze upon its branches and leaves as if we are in the shade looking up toward the sky. In the place of spiny thorns strips , barbed wire interlaces the tree’s spiraling branches referencing the imposition of non-indigenous influence into the local ecosystem.
Whatever reading one prefers (and there are many), the colors with the glowing edges that seem to radiate an other-worldly aura, and the gentle spiraling shape of the tree’s lattice of branches and thorns, present a calm, even joyous feeling of rest and serenity. When looking at this work, I long to sit in the tree’s shade and look up at the beautifully colored canopy.
Blending beauty and optimism with a potent socio-political critique has always been one of Federico Guzmán’s talents. Within the circular frame of Territorio Liberado a heart spirals outward from the center, transitioning from dark blue to purple, to red and on toward yellow, in effect reversing the gradation of the color wheel used in Ignis Novus. The tones however, are muted so as to be earthier. The combined works in the exhibition examine the construct of freedom by embracing the human spirit and our quest for freedom and autonomy. Recalling the words of an Egyptian revolutionary in Tahrir Square, Federico leaves an open door for hope: “One does not to have to be optimistic imagining an utopian future. The future is made up of an infinite succession of present moments, and standing up every day doing the right thing, facing it all, is already in itself a wonderful victory. “
Kirby Gookin
Territorio liberado
11 January – 22 February 2014
The works in Federico Guzmán’s exhibition Liberated Territory continue his 25-year exploration into defining and dismantling the artificial constructs that shape our personal and political identity. In surveying the works displayed here, we see new incarnations of familiar territory: spirals, circles, the gradated spectrum of the color wheel, and images glowing with an effervescent light so white-hot they could cut through steel. Combined, these motifs express his desire to break down the walls that constrain our freedoms.
A painting like Ignis Novus, expresses ideas that Federico and I discussed when becoming friends in the late 1980s. We were both preoccupied with the art and writing of Robert Smithson, and especially enamored by his slide lecture Hotel Palenque and the iconic Spiral Jetty. Energy. Vortexes. Entropy. Negentropy (negating entropy). Life. Death. Smithson explored the inefable universe in which everything decays and destruction is creation.
At the time, Federico often employed the spiral as a way to deconstruct, unwind and blur the distinctions between individual and state; placing the self in opposition to a socially constructed identity. I remember an early work “Psicoprovincia, “ (1989) in which he painted a large spiral (its length determined by his passport number) that emanated from the soles of his feet outward to cover most of his studio floor. What engages me about this work is that the spiral is a shape that extends inwardly and outwardly toward infinity. It is a concrete expression of the unlimited potential of freedom.
A year later, when reviewing Federico’s first solo exhibition in New York for Artforum, (September 1990), I focused primarily on his obliteration of geographic logic. One of the exhibition’s seminal works, “Las Fronteras Espirales,” was constructed from individual rubber silhouettes of the world’s countries cut into continuous strips that coiled inward toward the nation’s center. Unfurled and scattered haphazardly across the floor, they could no longer be read cartographically. This work was then used to create “Cuadro de las Fronteras Espirales,” by dipping the rubber strips in purple paint and imprinting their amorphous shape onto a rectangular canvas. With the geographic boundaries disintegrated into a decorative mass, the pictorial result was more Jackson Pollock than Map of the World. Stamping all four sides of the canvas with the letters “NSEO,” the world map merged into a single unified, but directionless field. The intertwined entanglement of cultural boundaries suggested the arbitrariness of geographic constructs by reducing the political boundaries of country-states into an amorphous mesh of meaninglessness.
Federico Guzmán’s art consistently explores the oppression created by socially imposed boundaries and the human desire for freedom and autonomy. For Paradise Europe, (BizArt, Copenhagen, 1992), an exhibition of commissioned public billboards installed throughout Denmark, Guzmán produced “Casualidades de la arqueología,” an expansive plane filled with two enlarged sheets of press-type displaying various “decorative borders.”
While the idea that political borders are artificial constructs was not new at the time (I’m thinking of Marcel Broodthaers’s Carte Du Monde Poetique (1968) which was created by substituting the LI of Politique, with an E so that it reads Poetique), its relevance gets perpetually renewed. Paradise Europe opened in 1992, a year full of celebrations (and anti-celebrations) of “Columbus’ Discovery of the New World.” This is also the year when the European Union was being formed, and with it the vague promise of Europe dismantling its borders. In this context, Federico’s oversized decorative border patterns suggest that borders are decorative, artificial. They are abstractions imposed upon a reality that it tries to suppress, and make invisible, so that it can create and control an alternative reality that is ultimately a lie.
The spiral is again referenced in Federico’s circular portrait of the Talja, a tree of resistance that survives in the extreme heat and waterless conditions of the desert. We gaze upon its branches and leaves as if we are in the shade looking up toward the sky. In the place of spiny thorns strips , barbed wire interlaces the tree’s spiraling branches referencing the imposition of non-indigenous influence into the local ecosystem.
Whatever reading one prefers (and there are many), the colors with the glowing edges that seem to radiate an other-worldly aura, and the gentle spiraling shape of the tree’s lattice of branches and thorns, present a calm, even joyous feeling of rest and serenity. When looking at this work, I long to sit in the tree’s shade and look up at the beautifully colored canopy.
Blending beauty and optimism with a potent socio-political critique has always been one of Federico Guzmán’s talents. Within the circular frame of Territorio Liberado a heart spirals outward from the center, transitioning from dark blue to purple, to red and on toward yellow, in effect reversing the gradation of the color wheel used in Ignis Novus. The tones however, are muted so as to be earthier. The combined works in the exhibition examine the construct of freedom by embracing the human spirit and our quest for freedom and autonomy. Recalling the words of an Egyptian revolutionary in Tahrir Square, Federico leaves an open door for hope: “One does not to have to be optimistic imagining an utopian future. The future is made up of an infinite succession of present moments, and standing up every day doing the right thing, facing it all, is already in itself a wonderful victory. “
Kirby Gookin