New World Chaos. His name already tells us something about his creativity.
Chaos, according to Hesiod’s Theogony, is the creative principle of the whole universe and of existence, both divine and mortal. “Verily at the first Chaos came to be” the antique poet says. Nothing was before that, therefore, thinking of a New World Chaos means to rethink creativity in our current context, where the overproduction and consumption of objects –and images, especially– is quite different from the origin of time, when everything was acquiring shape. We also know that Chaos, with the passing of time, has come to be synonymous with disaster, and –interesting tidbit– at some point “New World” meant America.
New World Chaos’ imaginary matter is fixed upon the profanation of the divine and the mortal, starting from plastic elements that would seem impossible to the humans that died before the 21st century, before the new millennium –I’m speaking, of course, of the tools offered by the digital realm. I will try to explain myself better.
Let’s call these collages of objects, in an imaginative exercise, “digital altars”. The profusion of images of Catholic christendom, Hinduism and other religions, next to totemic figures, like animals, computerized skulls and other brilliant objects and substances, liquids and viscosities that are as reflective as precious stones –offerings perhap–, human bodies, sometimes priests, parishioners, or mediums (offerings too? –as summoners of divinity and banality–); all these elements, together with references not pertaining only to religion, but to popular culture, from comics to cartoons to pictures, selfies of random people, are insoluble from the idea that (con)forms these altars. Which role each of these images has regarding their power of invocation –or profanation– remains a mystery or turns into a matter of speculation for each spectator.
On the other hand, the health of the bodies that appear in his pieces is always interdicted or calls for suspicion; here and there, perforated or bloody bodies emerge, showing some kind of imagination of pain, a stretch of sutured skin, for example. This health shares a hesitation with its materiality, due to the transparencies produced by the composition and the editing of the collaged layers –these details may be read as the strokes of an artist, the manipulation of the elements– which contribute a more spiritual aura.
But there is a peculiar image, perhaps one of the most disturbing ones, where we see some intubated newborns, plugged with cables and tubes, which, in spite of the violence they exert on their bodies –traversing their skins here and there, at the height of their intestine, their lungs, their small torsos or invading their nostrils with assisted breathing– they are precisely what supports their lives. Which malady affects these babies? Was life meant for them at all? This image shows the raw violence which humanity –its progress, its science and its technology– exerts against nature in the name of health, transgressing what the laws of destiny establish for every mortal.
Another hypermodern aspect of the mixture of religious images (Christian, Catholic, Hindu, African), living right next to animated figures coming, as we said, from comics, anime and general computer and television culture, is the addition of elements beyond the visual, which are direct and unknowable references for older generations. Linguistic signs that manifest a kind of connectivity (the possibility to re-ligate?) without the frontiers that are proper to the internet and the digital, as may be read in the web address on one of the pieces: “kaotic.com”.
Then, the profanation of the divine does not occur solely in a gradation related to faith, rituals and sacrifices, but seems to be incarnated in the very nature of humanity: the only animals capable of intervening their own biologic machinery to cure themselves, the only animals on the face of the Earth that may conjure, the animals that created faith and are capable of modifying the functioning of the Earth to make their desires reachable, to consume them and generate other desires, extending always farther away, as if the impulse, the sense, the coherence and the motivation of their existence was, today more than ever, to be found in a heart outside the body, a heart of artifices.
Finir
