ALBUM
Chanivet – Paco Sanguino
ARS LONGA, VITA BREVIS :
COMO HACER UNA VANITAS EN LA POSVERDAD
Patricia Bueno del Río
In these days, approaching fatalism is not something that is alien to us. What’s more, it springs to mind every time we put our feet on the ground, regardless of the generation to which we belong. But this realistic bath is not insignificant or recurrent, but rather denotes the certainty of a need for evasion, reminiscent of rhetorical reflective clichés on the finiteness of things.
The instant, the fleeting and the transitory are manifested in this exhibition through the use of the concept of “frozen” which is based, in this case, on the capture of the photographic image or with the configuration of contemporary still lifes of memory that take us back to the vanitas.
Álbum seems to speak of the instant and the fragment collected in a capsule and approaches it from two angles. Thus, the work of Chanivet (Puerto Real, Cádiz, 1964) is metaphysical, symbolic and complex. That of Sanguino (Seville, 1962) is realistic and disturbing, both charged with a personal and beautiful meaning that invites introspection and delight, and immerses us in a transcendental universe that from different languages allude to the expiration of the moment.
In both cases, this valuable question is not ethereal because, behind it, this poetic vision becomes sensible, committed, political, as if in some way, these authors were taking the tempus fugit to post-truth, becoming fallacious communicators who, through the correct, the changeable and the fleeting, promote perspective and trust.
If we observe carefully, we can distinguish the approaches that these authors launch through the elements that appear: on the one hand they are people, configured scenes that help to recall simple but pleasant moments, on the other, ideas based on things, elements that appear to be unconnected but that carry an eloquent intentionality through a display of forms, objects and fragments that appeal to the awakening of the different senses: spectacularity, frivolity and baroque thought.
But the context is very different, because in a global and hyper-connected world the cognitive-rational gives way to the cognitive-emotional, and with it, they give strength to the symbols, which violently trap the yearning, super-informed and disheartened subjects, while they, oblivious to everything, embrace in a pertinent manner what they find in their surroundings and it comes to them in the key of verisimilitude, an aspect that, on the other hand, has always been alien to art.
All in all, the exhibition is conceived as an existential positioning in which amusement and astonishment are two ways of escaping from the problems of truth. Thus, these two questions, which end up impregnating these images, serve as a reflection of a troubled and disillusioned era, but which becomes positivist through artistic creation, reflected with tinges of illusion, theatricality and paradoxical sense.
April, 2022″
