Hugo Palmar’s Transits

Carmen Alicia Di Pasquale

“… a man in exile is always a man lurking, the way he watches, when endowed with the imagination of a writer and a thinker, gives him the capability to ‘anticipate so many things’ beyond the moment he is living in.”

George Didi-Huberman

“The real is what flees.”

Hugo Palmar

 

It is perhaps the first time that an artist puts me in a quandary to choose between reinforcing his own discourse or giving my own clues to stimulate readings of his work from those visiting his exhibition. This quandary comes from a kind of construction of a gray area between the inside and the outside —or which amounts to the same thing: between forms and modalities of subjectivity and the different expressions of reality—, opened up by the issues, the reflections, and the pieces gathered in Gastvjheid. Freedom of the Guest?

This portion of Hugo Palmar’s works points to a zone of flux between interiority, which can be defined as that space non-existent for the others, and the world, in which perceptions are more or less common according to a normative order that naturalizes what are really nothing but arbitrary moral and epistemic impositions. Hugo pauses to show us that interstitial space in different ways. On the one hand, he is a wandering emigrant that has turned the unceasing transit, governed by the need to comply (or not) with the norms that apply to foreigners, into a modality in which experience takes shape. On the other hand, his work brings together a series of symbols that express an interiority overflowing the «I»’s structures in more than one sense, but that, as subjectivity, challenges any attempt to communicate with the other.

His pieces can refer, with equivalent (reading) force, both to the private worlds of dreams or narcolepsy, and to the political sphere with its ruminations on the effects and cracks of the Caribbean modernity, especially those pertaining to norms regulating the commercialization of tourism. Hugo accomplishes this through the construction of a constantly dynamic order that at times identifies the body with the territory, and at times associates the politics emerging from such a high-valued concept as hospitality with the margins and the folds of its most obscure drifts in human desire.

“In fact, as another aspect of this intermediate space, this work moves in or above the politics of desire. The desire of the other in its double character: as consumption “object” and as the possibility of a welcome reception. Desire turns thus into this radical “between” in which we perceive ourselves as an I capable of providing a place for the other. But such an inclusion can happen either as appropriation or as openness, thus producing a tension that seems particularly interesting to Hugo, since he perceives it, understands it, and expresses it as a condition that, although subjective, is nonetheless spatial. Besides, this interest is related to what happens with language when one is a foreigner, for the need to constantly translate ideas in order to communicate requires a permanent negotiation between what one is and what one has to become, but radically facing the other. This Venezuelan settled in Dutch territory tells me, for example, that the meaning of Gastvjheid oscillates between the notions of guest and freedom. From that fact, Hugo tries to explore —think and express— what is and what has been his relationship with the other and with otherness as a foreigner, as well as the forms of reception that regulate hospitality and its exchanges —an idea on which we insist since it constitutes the unifying thread of this exhibit”.

The colonial/modern Caribbean that turned him into a foreigner seems to Hugo a metaphor in itself, without ceasing to be real. The liquid borders that dilute the territory, islands that turn into fragments the solidity of the national ideal, appear to him as analogies of our own island condition, in which we at some point receive the other and establish with him the conditions of that reception. At this point in Hugo’s considerations, that extend from subjectivity to the inhabited territory, as if they went through it as a stream of energy, I am not sure whether his ideas crisscross or mesh, but at any rate they face us with these and other questions: if we all, as each one of us, are those Caribbean islands, then who receives and who is received? Who is the foreigner in the Dutch Caribbean that speaks so many languages?

As a man in exile, Hugo can anticipate and think of modernity and its modes of impossible homogeneity, in the constant diversity of that untamable Caribbean. This reflection can be expressed, among several other evocations, with the symbolic use of the reticula whose origin refers to the spaces of hygiene, but is additionally associated, here, to those impossible limits of modern rigour on the multiple Caribbean, scattered in languages and cultures. Asking Hugo for the other symbols can be, more than a key to his work, an opportunity to build multiple readings of it. When I did it, the only thing that came out was an amazing amount of relationships, which made the reading of the corpus of his work similar to the reading of a hypertext.

The oneiric or narcotic images, the façades and back stores metaphorically associated with tables and domestic spaces. The raw material of a smeared flower, the transit of assembled bodies and the substances of the Caribbean, lined by the sea and overflowing the square, normative regimes. From homosexuality to heteropatriarchy, as recto and verso of one and the same place: masculinity. Liquid that can be either seminal extraction or raw material for some hallucinogenic; mouths that are ani. Plants that are phalli, phalli that are chewable although not edible vegetables. Memories clinging to commercial brands linked to the representation of mementoes. Parallel worlds of the order and the forms of politeness and desire rid from their restrictions, as if transparency would interfere with the persistency of the separation between the public and the private spheres. Revulsion and desire; filth and hygiene. Order and overflow.

There are no opposites in a world built to show us the impossible limits between the inside and the outside, in a world that wants to tell us something about the territorial transit of the most intimate experience.

Carmen Alicia Di Pasquale. Los tránsitos de Hugo Palmar. Texto Vrijheid van de gast. 2019.