… la cuestión del archivo no es, repitámoslo, una cuestión del pasado. No es la cuestión de un concepto del que dispusiéramos o no dispusiéramos ya en lo que concierne al pasado, un concepto archivable del archivo. Es una cuestión de porvenir, la cuestión del porvenir mismo, la cuestión de una respuesta, de una promesa y de una responsabilidad para mañana.
Jacques Derrida.
La chica que me atendió en El Archivo Nacional de Países Bajos me dijo que yo había caído como un paracaidista (sin hacer cita previa), pero que estaba muy bien, que era simpático. Y entendió cuando le dije que mi interés al buscar esas imágenes en la página de internet del Archivo, era tener una idea de la visión que guarda este Archivo Nacional sobre mi país de origen. Ella se emocionó cuando le dije que había crecido en un campo petrolero de la Shell, lo vi en sus ojos.
Hugo Palmar, Whatsapp 9 de agosto 2023.
Retrofuturistisch raam in een villa nabij Caracas. Archivo pseudomimético, acrylic on linen, 36,5×35 cm, 2023. – Raam in een villa bij Caracas in Venezuela, Fotocollectie Van de Poll, National Archief NL.
En 1994 el filósofo argelino-francés Jacques Derrida, dicta una conferencia que ha pasado a ser referencia para los artistas contemporáneos dedicados a la revisión de archivos. Fue titulada originalmente «El concepto de archivo. Una impresión freudiana». Para aquel entonces, hace ya treinta años, la política de la memoria en Venezuela tenía una inclinación hacia la ciencia de la historia y una ideología en torno a la democracia social. Siendo así, la relación con los archivos que tenía el país en ese momento, surgía de una estructura claramente nacional en la que el Estado se encargaba de resguardar los documentos en dispositivos institucionales como El Archivo General de la Nación o el Instituto Autónomo Biblioteca Nacional (inaugurado como tal en 1977, aunque con antecedentes de 1833), además de los museos, otros institutos autónomos, academias históricas y demás dispositivos convencionales creados, conceptual o físicamente, en el hemisferio occidental, durante los siglos XIX y XX sin sesgos ideológicos como los actuales1.
Un archivo, según señala Derrida al comienzo de su texto, tiene “aspectos técnicos, jurídicos y políticos” que provocan el mal de archivo, al generar la exclusión deliberada de lo indeseado como memoria. Esto quiere decir que un archivo se sustenta en una manipulación, conclusión a la que llega este filósofo en un contexto de pleno funcionamiento de los archivos que lo rodean. Sin embargo, un poco más adelante, es el mismo Derrida quien nos da una pista importante para detectar un tipo de mal de archivo —una manipulación— opuesto al que él se refiere cuando dice: “nunca se renuncia… a apropiarse de un poder sobre el documento, sobre su posesión, su retención o su interpretación”. Esta afirmación tan tajante podría quedar subrayada por los recuerdos de un exiliado venezolano que ha decidido dialogar con sus memorias y con la ruina (o la decolonización, según convenga) del país petrolero en el que vivió su infancia, su adolescencia y los primeros años del resto de su vida, a través de la revisión de un archivo que está fuera de Venezuela. Pero sería un diálogo no solo con “aquel entonces”, sino con el “ahora” en el que la destrucción de la industria petrolera ha llegado al culmen convirtiendo a la principal referencia del paisaje marabino, el Lago de Maracaibo, en un caldo de petróleo vertido, fertilizantes y algas productoras, no de oxígeno, sino de toxinas.
Pumping for Tia Juana Light, all the green of this Basin, Acrylic on linen 32 x 32 cm, 2023. – Tia Juana Pump Station over the Maracaibo Lake, Randy Trahan Archive. – Maps, stones, shells, images from Shell´s Book, Cabimas Campo la Rosa. Preciosas piedras volátiles y otras historias. – Vista de Sala. Centro de Bellas Artes Ateneo de Maracaibo, 2023.
Hugo Palmar, quien no “renuncia… a apropiarse de un poder sobre el documento…” nació en Ciudad Ojeda en 1977 y con apenas dos años se muda a vivir a Tía Juana, el Campo de la empresa transnacional petrolera anglo-holandesa, la Shell Petroleum Corporation. Desde hace unos cinco años vive en Amsterdam y allí restaura —reinventa, restituye, recompone… — usando principalmente el Archivo Nacional de Países Bajos (AN-PP.BB.), las memorias de aquel “vecindario” que tenía tanques petroleros, balancines y pozos. Las imágenes que van apareciendo en el motor de búsqueda conectan a Hugo con las historias de la familia (o al menos eso pienso a partir de un diálogo que me abre a un mundo desconocido de mi propio país petrolero), como la del jolgorio de su bisabuela bañándose en petróleo durante la explosión del pozo Barroso II en 1922.
Uno de los campos en el que crece el artista-investigador venezolano del AN-PP.BB. tenía escuelas, clínicas, clubes, canchas deportivas, estadios, parques, iglesia, mercado, centro sindical, carnicería, policía, camiones de pescado, puestos de empanadas, refresquerías, restaurantes, fuentes de soda, un bar, algunos kioskos de lotería, puesto de zapatero, peluquería, campos de golf y un destacamento de la Guardia Nacional2. Es decir, un crisol de instalaciones propias de la cultura local o de otros lugares, con servicios para los expatriados y para los empleados venezolanos. Se trataba de la creación de una cotidianidad mediante la que se inoculaba la cultura del orden y la racionalidad buscando potenciar el funcionamiento de la industria en un país que hasta comienzos del siglo XX había permanecido rural.
El archivo fuera de su condición de autoridad —expoliado, olvidado, deteriorado o despreciado (por burgués)—, no restituye la opresión, la censura o la supresión de la memoria que están implicadas en el llamado mal de archivo derridiano sino que muta en mal del olvido provocando, no la desaparición de la manipulación, sino la ruptura generacional calculada. De modo que, tanto en el mal de archivo perfectamente instituido como en la desaparición de estos dispositivos, las recuperaciones son igualmente invocadas.
It wasn´t the bees, I was fighting. Acrylic on linen 65 cm x 55 cm. 2023. – Hold climbing the sky, Acrylic on linen 65 x 55 cm 2023. – Oil drilling dream house, Acrylic on linen, 25 cm x 21 cm, 2023.
Este deseo de memoria tiene lugar en la exposición de título evocador «Preciosas piedras volátiles y otras historias». Todo comienza con la pulsión de atender los recuerdos de una infancia distante a la que se suma un país no solo lejano, sino interrumpido en un modelo desarrollista que estuvo definido por la industria petrolera transnacional. Este trabajo tiene lugar en un país petrolero que ya no lo es y en un ciudadano venezolano que indaga sus memorias de la infancia en los campos petroleros de las compañías transnacionales apenas recién nacionalizadas3, desde los archivos sistematizados del Estado neerlandés, es decir, a través de los intereses de las empresas de este país. Todas estas líneas de fuerza —memoria, corporaciones transnacionales petroleras, país de cultura arrasada, colonialismo/decolonialismo, autoridad del archivo y destrucción— son manejadas por Hugo mediante varios recursos como la ralentización del tiempo que ocurre en los procesos de la pintura, la elaboración de una imagen/tiempo en video y la incorporación de documentos cartográficos encontrados (próximos al objet trouvé). Las imágenes halladas en los archivos bajo parámetros de búsqueda que imantan “lo petrolero”, “Venezuela”, “Shell”… con la nostalgia irrecuperable de la lejanía y la desaparición, se agrupan en una constelación real del espacio expositivo, para decirnos algo de esa subjetividad deslocalizada, tal y como sucede en la memoria de cada uno de nosotros, aunque no nos detengamos a pensarlo.
Vertrek van Pia Beck per “Statendam” naar Amerika, Curacao, Venezuela en Havanna, National Archief NL. Queer artist in the Statendam (Pseudomimetische archief), acrylic on canvas 18 x 21 cm, HP 2023. Mi ta bai bin bek (queer artist naar Venezuela), Acrylic on linen HP 2023.
La relación de este trabajo de cura metafórica, pero también psíquica, con el texto cuestionador y confrontador de Derrida, poco tiene que ver con la denuncia por el control y el poder. Frente a la imposibilidad de cuidar unos archivos que registran la ficción mnémica de la infancia, Hugo trabaja en un gesto restaurador, de cuidado, mediante el largo tiempo que dedica a revisar el archivo neerlandés bajo los parámetros que bien podrían representar el deseo (el anhelo, la anticipación…) y lo reactiva a una escala ínfima —por ello gestual—, dándole color a imágenes que no lo tienen y otorgándole narrativa a fotografías que están muy próximas al olvido o al desinterés. Pero a través de esta restauración personal, los que nos acercamos a la muestra recuperamos algo perdido, porque comenzamos a pensar en aristas imprevistas del país petrolero que fuimos o del país decolonizado que somos, proceso que para algunos es una utopía y para otros una distopía que se vive día a día en penurias y desesperanza.
Hugo se ha hecho muchas preguntas a lo largo de esta investigación, algunas he podido retenerlas en mis notas, como ésta: ¿hasta dónde un archivo hace la historia o construye la memoria? Para él se trata de la construcción de una “identidad narrativa”.
1 Para el momento en el que escribimos este texto en agosto del 2023, existe una colección del Archivo General de la Nación de Venezuela llamada “Democracia burguesa, Fascismo y Revolución”, por ejemplo. En relación a los institutos como la Biblioteca Nacional, los museos o las academias, los dispositivos para el manejo, conservación/preservación y la activación de archivos están severamente afectados por una carencia presupuestaria acumulada que indica claramente, la política de la memoria desde 1998, año en el que inicia el período conocido como revolucionario y la infravaloración de los archivos, sobre todo, del siglo XX, siglo en el cual se centra la revisión de Hugo Palmar.
2 Tomado del correo electrónico de Hugo Palmar a Carmen Alicia Di Pasquale, 2 de julio 2023.
3 La nacionalización de la industria petrolera ocurre en 1975, dos años antes del nacimiento de Hugo Palmar.
“… 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 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.
Text especially written for the exhibit Gastvjheid, Freedom of the Guest?Magazijn Gallery, Amsterdam. September 2019
What are the body’s material and discursive limits? What is the territory of “a genitality” that finds its own way and evolves without prejudices into an expanded sexuality, a sexuality filled with signifying human practices?
Whoever has suffered numberless exclusions and “eliminations” form the symbolic and collective universe, whoever has been sieged and isolated from her/his own condition and identity experience, never stops questioning the disturbing and dominating politics that, for centuries, have delimited a finite field for the body, assigned a limited use to its potentialities and stigmatized millions of desiring subjects.
This imperative and oppressive limit, with which an imaginary horizon, an enclosed space was established for the body, made lives explode, bereaving them of any recognizable humanity. Hugo Palmar’s works invite us to think about the history of an allegedly “strange” humanity, thus calling into question a feared “ethnopoetics” of sex, barbarism and loneliness.
His works show a number of formless and informing bodies; bodies that become abyss and trim themselves into a cancelled territory; bodies that although traveling through a known space, set on fire a metaphorically forgotten place.
His paintings, in their need to establish relationships, to build and share both lived and imagined worlds, express feelings and dissent, memories and experiences mixed with food that cannot feed, clothes that cannot shelter. Painted in bubble-gum pink, weakly delineated and with a deep encircling brush-stroke, Palmar’s bodies are tormented and bled out flesh, torn flesh, a space in memory seeking to evince the oppression and the pain of the sexes; “bodies that weep” and, like many others, cannot embrace confronted to a repressive political sphere that grows and chases away the egalitarian relationships.
While his paintings attempt to create a didactic space of subordination and make more complex the debate over those excluded categories of gender, his videos roam hovering in the tide of transience, move in ample beginnings filled with shortages, thus capturing the idea of a over-modernity full of anonymity, surrender and wreck.
Hugo Palmar thus brings to light multiple shelters, full of militia and courage. He points out –certainly not with the will of the powerful– that even when we believe we are moving onto more memorable surroundings that expand gender and sexuality, art and the body become again the thermometer needed to illuminate certain surroundings of violent and fossilized naturalization, certain stereotypes that continue to well up and “to configure the materialized foundation of power arrangements”, that absurd sovereignty into which some people weave the norms of gender, norms that many, either under command or out of shyness, are forced to suffer and/or renounce.
By Daniel Fischer Resistencia, El Chaco, Argentina, 2015.
Text for the exhibition May you have a body, Super Political and Stateless. MACZUL 2015. Museography and curatorship: Jimmy Yánez.
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.
What Hugo Palmar says in I am reveals several readings there, where the “I”, the first person’s pronoun, finds –with the photographic display of the artist’s own naked body–a way of inhabiting, purely and autobiographically, installations, drawings and projections. Symbolic reconstruction, imaginary reflection of what has been experienced silently in pain, finds in art, in the power of expressing it, a liberating joy. The exhibit gathers the artist’s attempt at placing himself in the scene and installing, at the same time, the spectator in a symbolic space of barrack’s confinement.
These concentration camp-like scenes project intimate actions before the eyes of the spectator, just like they develop in that conjured-up, other world, where even the objects of intimate spaces (bedrooms, bathrooms, bunk-beds, lockers, showers) line up as an addition or a multiplication, abstracting from them every singular trace, as in a subtraction of their differences. The strokes of those objects will appear, in different translations of lines and colors, in order to make them singular in hybrid works, between drawing and painting; moving images of bodies in the projections enliven a sort of naked humanity in mitigating uniformity there where a single skin rests without the uniform. To further sensitize the spectator, the installations add the necessary third dimension to make even more real the imaginary of the physical and artistic reconstruction of sites.
These spaces, in which it is said I am without being, take life to its tense extreme border between uniformity and singularity, where we can add the aesthetic sense of tensions every contemporary artist feels between the institutionalized singularity of the arts and so many things that blur diversity with a uniform vision of life. Adopting the autobiographical form, Hugo Palmar opens up the reflection that dyes his work with a tragic and social conversion, when ideology, education, politics or religion project its threat into the future. Art exorcizes the threat of the past addressed to the future: I AM has its origin in my past and my work is a way of exorcizing the future.
Hugo Palmar is a young contemporary artist whose work, in regard to the medium, ranges from bidimensional representations to installations, and, in regard to his discourse, from the intimate realm to the collective expression. This versatility comes from his conviction that every action in the creative process is a constitutive and an essential part of both the work and life, since to him there is no clear-cut separation between the vital process and the artistic outcome.
Drawings and installations are not consecutive steps, but elements that mesh and feed each other. Although the drawings constitute the most basic aspect of his work, they do not serve, in principle, as sketches or projects, but are instead the channel for the material expression of a series of intimate conjectures, that appear on paper through the linkage of tiny and elaborate images. What we could call (in a daring literary expression) reflexive drawings present, formally, extensive fields of color upon which a closed weave of figures is juxtaposed. It is a minute drawing, linear, flat, or with hints at a perspective, in which a number of characters, scenes and environments of industrial ancestry appear.
The installations are the tridimensional manifestation of some insistently drawn scenes in these material exercises of thought. There is no specific point in which an image takes precedence over the others. Palmar states that all of his drawings could be understood as future installations; but as soon as he decides that a particular environment is to be materialized, he undertakes a new drawing process in which there is now a real intention of projecting strongly theatrical stages. Each step of the process, from the drawings, the sketches, and the montage to the installation are part of a whole that can be understood both as a whole or through its individual elements.
Furthermore, each work gathers subjective evocations of lived situations, memories symbolically recreated, through which the artist addresses his nightmares, traumas, and fears to free himself from them, but also to show that his personal experience is a concrete symptom of social events. I am could also be You are or We are, all of us, part of a system that coerces us and overwhelms us. Palmar seeks to show that the power system is structured through institutions in charge of establishing the order and transmitting the patterns of behavior that homogenize individual actions in favor of collective organization, always prone to obedience.
Only the individual can be reflective, and that is the warning at stake in this exhibit. Each person is unavoidably subjected to external forces that shape her/his life and over which s/he has no control (and of which sometimes s/he is not even conscious). But additionally, certain institutions try to dissolve the spaces of intimacy, as a tool to replace individual conscience with a collective conformation that obeys, with ease and force, to the survival needs of the power structures. This is not the result of an intrinsically perverse praxis; it is the normal behavior of a contemporary social and institutional construct. Palmar just feeds off his memories to point out to us what is going on, in keeping with his thesis on the proximity of art and life.
