In the dreaming man’s dream, the dreamed one awoke.
J. L. Borges

For a number of years now we have heard talk quite vehemently about the revolutionary chapters the reorganization of power games in the virtual territories of the Internet era and the social media have opened up for millions of new protagonisms. Nevertheless, in regard to a hope for a more effective world, a world that would know and make itself better communicated, the picture doesn’t seem to respond completely to that project, which already appears as a dystopia of the utopic: wars, decline, misery, totalitarianisms, populisms, poverty, arbitrariness, chaos, and inequality are the forceful protagonists of the breakdowns of a beaten up 21 st century.

The outline of that new citizen, thanks to its unfolding ability, seems to gain power, to control with its schemes the directionality of small or huge communities. At times, s/he does it the right way, at times, the ego’s amalgam takes the best of her/him: a self that according to her/his own interests goes beyond everyone and everything; s/he rams against what s/he encounters no matter the consequences. S/he allocates coercive models, reorganizes territoriality, draws the citizen’s legal and historic frontiers, ties up the spaces of discursive classification and representational practices, and occasionally, taking a dangerous step-beyond, restrains even the individual’s bodily rules for her/his intimate relationships with her/himself and with others.

In this way, hegemony and subalternity have experienced a complex turn in our current situation, exploding from unexpected zones, transforming, through a delirious power game, the development of history itself. However, in spite of the big changes, of examples exposed by the media, of public campaigns, of the documents made public, and particularly of the alleged new general participation, a history keeps being written in the silences of nowhere. It is from the sweat of the alternate body, split and lonely, from the sunken steps of a laborious and subterranean margin, that the images of Hugo Palmar’s most recent work, gathered under the title: May you have a body (Superpolitical and Stateless), emerge.

Hugo Palmar is a young Venezuelan artist, born in the west coast of the Maracaibo lake; a creator who has an already well stablished career, both in Venezuela and in several places abroad, in the realm of visual creation. The problematics of power and its structure, as well as the symbolic, emotional and social consequences they infuse into the individual, are the fundamental thread of his work; action mechanisms with which he rounded two individual exhibits: I AM (2006), in the Cevaz Gallery, in Maracaibo, and “m i c r o p o l i t i c s” (2010), in the INSIGHT Foundation for the Arts, in Aruba. From 2009 on, he has lived in different Latin-American cities and currently resides in what he calls the Dutch Caribbean.

It is precisely this breaking point, which the exile condition transformed from an ideal concern into a misalignment between territories, the peculiar activity that seems to stand out in the visual sonority of his most recent production: works that point to the extracts of a new mythology; spaces bled dry of reality, tied to the fantastic alliterations of a world both parallel and real. It is no longer the complaint of the belonging organism in pain but the evanescence of the banished map fighting for its continuous presence within the dark borders of desire. In each one of the pieces, there is a phantasmagoric groping, an unstated clause, arising from the chaos that floods as well the irrational layers nesting in the spectator’s grounds.

Like the quote from the short story The Circular Ruins, by Jorge Luis Borges, placed at the beginning of this text, it would seem that, facing the development of that alternative space, of that moving inner-history that keeps writing itself in a non-place, it rises in Parmar’s work a tangle, sighted from the indescribable angles of images emerging from the edge to announce their breakdown: figures through which the subaltern subject seems to rebuild itself, anchored in the nonconventional furrow of historical hierarchies and fostering, with the questions about itself, the fissure.

Our world, in a counterpoint between the virtual and the tangible, is the thread through which the fragments of that subordinate patina, with which the artist works, are strung together: formal and conceptual fissures that can be observed in the social, political, sexual, and emotional weave that sets in motion each of the stories and relationships put forth in the total development of his artistic program. A suspended iconographic set that pierces the malleable sieve of the subdued in order to unfold, from the textual fractures of meaning and the construction out of segments, deep relationships confronting us with a discourse against the grain: a history which is in itself anti-historic. From the other side of the Caribbean, Palmar’s oeuvre is at the same time building and defoliating itself. It closes up and changes the gaze’s order to displace itself from the traditional judgment of the hegemonic/subaltern categories to the dimensions where the being’s fundamental problems nest: an uninhabited entity that keeps resisting in the unreliable by-paths of our societies.

This mirroring between one side and the other is a counterpoint sketched not only as an excuse to start ruminations about the power of contemporary life but also as the silent window through which an unfinished sequence of the human escapes, a circular time that we can fathom in the structural ramifications of the small visual stories the artist proposes. Through video, collage, drawing, installation and painting, he displays a polyphony of readings and notes, made out of everydayness and lived experiences, a movable cannon, scattered, constantly demoted between author, characters, and voices; between first and third persons, witnesses and omniscient persons; a drawn no-end erased by geographical notes, diluted maps, chromatic whispers, poetic shadows, morphological crimes or voiceless scores that move from dream to waking life, from the political landscape to the chronicle in free fall, from reality to fiction.

In this contract with the spectator, the work breathes in the explosions of death and origin, in a prison like oblivion’s skin and remembrance’s trap. Everything seems to vanish in the confession of what was never said, on the never exposed side of one’s own; an unannounced stretch certifying the presence of an I (individual and collective) always turning its back to the
world. In Hugo Palmar’s recent work there is a polyphonic verse, stablished from the undecipherable to unleash in the reader the uneasiness of a sequence that, although scattered and buried, is real, clear, direct, terrible: in the dream of the man that –from the other side– dreamed,
the dreamed one awoke.

Lorena González Inneco
Caracas 2015

[1] In The Circular Ruins, time is presented by Jorge Luis Borges as an absolute space, an intelligible sphere whose active center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere. In that text, a taciturn foreigner comes from the South, arrives in sacred land in order to dream up a man, to create him and impose him upon reality. The foreigner dreams that man night after night, until the dreamed man awakes. Once this phantasm is born, his father decides to send him to other lands; the dreamer has taken care of erasing from the other’s mind all memories of his creation, of his birth,
of his learning, so that he could feel, wherever he went, like any other man. Once the son had left, the foreigner’s temple is besieged by a fire; in solitude, he thinks that his days are about to end and decides to let the flames consume him and so to end his life in devotion and dignity. The fire however does not consume him, simply caresses him, which makes him realize that he too is but an appearance that another man is dreaming of.


Text for the exhibition May you have a body, Super Political and Stateless. MACZUL 2015. Museography and curatorship: Jimmy Yánez.