The transhuman imagination

Marcelo Guimaraes Lima

The following is a presentation written for the catalog of the exhibition of paintings and photographs of Darwin Guevarra at Tashkeel in Dubai from May 7 to June 11, 2009

Darwin Guevarra is a painter and photographer. The present exhibition at Tashkeel, his first one-man show in Dubai, focus on paintings, or rather, painting-assemblages: mixed media works constructed with a myriad of objects - pipes, machine parts, everyday utensils or parts of utensils, coils, wires, etc, - glued upon a canvas surface attached to panels.

This myriad of heterogeneous objects and materials interact with the painted surfaces and painted figures: heads, faces, the human body and body parts. They interact with molded reliefs of faces and heads, and with collaged photographic fragments, printed images, etc. as well as with painted representations of common objects. Inanimated objects such as, for instance, a tennis shoe, a dollar bill, or creatures reduced to an inanimated state, and therefore to the common condition of objects, such as dead fishes, butterflies, plants and plant fragments, etc.

They interact also with painted duplications of the same materials, machine parts, wires, etc, in a kind of play of mirrors: a play between the collaged objects and their painted symbols or painted doubles.

In his paintings, the artist employs, many times in the form of parody, the strategies of trompe-l’oeil art. At the same time, he utilizes formal elements and concepts reminiscent of art brut or outsider art. These works also resonate something of the atmosphere of the so-called “Gothic” style of modern day popular culture and mass culture.

In their hybrid nature, that is, in the myriad of heterogeneous forms and sources, both conscious and unconscious, informing the imagination and the practice of the artist, we may say that these paintings touch upon some specific elements of our post-modern condition.

One of them is the crossing of genres and domains between “higher” cultural forms and mass culture. In the culture of this first decade of the 21st century, transitional forms, translations and hybrids between the “fine arts” and the “popular” or commercial arts, take the place of the “transgressions” of the avant-garde movements in the early part of the 20th century.

The historical avant-gardes of the early 20th century wanted to “implode” the arts to open up new creative possibilities and new forms of cultural action, production and intervention. What was at the time a struggle for a radical transformation of the conditions of artistic production and of the role of the arts in the culture at large, has, in a sense, become a “given” but, as a different process, that is, a process of a different nature, in a dissimilar context, and with a different meaning.

Today, new technologies of production and communication cut across the divisions between professional and amateur art, between expertise and specialization, on one hand, and spontaneous expressions, on the other. We are confronted with a gamut of mixed genres and diverse circumstances, with their different forms, audiences and different, sometimes conflicting, demands.

The result of this condition is, on one hand, a new territory of possibilities. On the other hand, a new form of paralysis of the artistic imagination, caught within the abstract universal equivalence of cultural forms and practices, and within the limits and restrictions of the given social circuits of communication.

Darwin Guevarra - Stand as a Human for Humanity,
oil and collage on board, 150 x 200 cm

At the thematic level, the works of Darwin Guevarra explore the paradoxes of the human subject in the contemporary world. The question of the identity of the post-modern subject is here the question of the transformations, or more specifically, of the technologically induced and produced mutations of the body. The new image of man is that of the cyborg, that is, the transhuman, generated by a symbiotic process between man and the machine. In the paintings we see the body disjointed and dismembered, the body trespassed by machine parts, the body integrated into external circuits of energy and information, and therefore submitted to external processes and forces. In short: the heteronomous body.

The paintings of Darwin Guevarra, with their patterning and multiplication of objects, recurring arrangements of heterogeneous part and materials, integrated to the larger dispositif of the rectangular canvas, are like enlarged electronic boards, with their complex circuitry and connections. In search for the understanding of the brave new world of our new transhuman existence, the artist imaginatively remakes by hand, out of scraps and discarded "low tech" materials, these basic unities of communication and energy exchanges of our time: the computer chip and the computer board.

There is an interesting contrast and relationship between the paintings and the photographic works of Darwin Guevarra. In his photographic works, we observe a self conscious display of photographic technique, the use of strong contrasts, intense colors, a fascination with photographic effects that, at times, does not refrain from the spectacular and the glitzy. By contrast, this series of paintings are somber in their colors and moods, at times strangely silent and almost meditative. And yet, they are also, in their own ways, strident and spectacular. In their deliberated coarse expression, in their relatively large sizes, in the drama of rough surfaces and dark colors, in their self conscious theatrical tones and reiterative communicative strategies, these works boldly court, now and again, the rhetorically bombastic

Mixing eschatological symbolism, narrative and raw art, these art works also quote narrative forms such as the storyboard, the comics and film. We can observe, therefore, that these dark and elaborated paintings have also a fictional, ironic and ludic dimension. Their closest film analogy would be a cross between The Matrix and Cidade de Deus (City of God): "high-tech" narrative and the imagination of daily life, that is, brains and bodies under the pressures of circuits of information and the quest for survival, among social and cultural circuits of exploitation, power and powerlessness.

Link: Tashkeel