Mutant Remipedes
Remípedes Mutantes
2011
This series is based on the use of the oar as a metaphor to symbolize nature's struggle for survival, in this case the survival of an element from the forest through wood and the use of traditional wood-sculpting technique in this material. This material was discarded both by man and by nature and I collected it as part of the work process. The study addresses the morphological mutations of the work that occurs during the creative process in the studio. The “Oar”, during this process, undergoes metamorphosis and incorporates certain characteristics, tentacles, farming instruments, organic cells, that ensure its adaptation to the very environment that attacks it.
Essa série se baseia na utilização do remo como metáfora que simboliza a luta da natureza pela sobrevivência, neste caso a sobrevivência de um elemento da mata através da madeira e a utilização de técnica tradicional da escultura nesse material. Este material foi descartado tanto pelo homem como pela natureza e catado por mim como parte do processo de trabalho. Essa pesquisa trata sobre as mutações morfológicas da obra que acontecem durante o processo criativo no ateliê. O “Remo”, no meio desse processo, vai sofrendo uma metamorfose e incorporando certas características, tentáculos, instrumentos agrícolas, células orgânicas, que garantem sua adaptação ao próprio meio que o agride.
Madeira / Wood
2011
Mutant Remipedes
In the early 2000s Jorge Rodríguez-Aguilar’s work drew on the popular urban repertoires of his native Colombia. These specific repertoires, however, were essentially no different to others from Latin America and even from Africa. By analogy we can therefore assert that his works from the period spoke not only to the situation in Colombia, or in Brazil, but to a certain kind of greater tension, common to the cities of those two continents, where a portion of his work is aimed not only at the manufacture of goods for low-income layers of society, but also at the production of equipment used by small-scale street trade, stalls and vendors: carts, boards of various functions, wheelbarrows and displays familiar to the streets of Latin American and African cities of all sizes.
These works of Jorge’s therefore developed the specific artistic potential of such popular consumer items. However, the artist directly borrowed only some of them the production circles of utility objects, as he recreated, rather than acquired, the street trade equipment which he used as displays.
Rodríguez-Aguilar’s assimilation or reconstruction of products in this phase of his work cannot, therefore, be understood simply as praise of handicraft, seeing as they originate from manufacture. Nor should they be taken as a symptom of an acritical appreciation of the design, as they fall short of its logic, resulting from the practical recognition of certain economic activities common to the dog-eat-dog approach of the Latin American elites. These are works that possess a vague (albeit poetic) statute. They correspond neither to one extreme (handicraft), nor to the other (design), but to the intersection of the two.
The set of works now on show, which Rodríguez-Aguilar calls Mutant Remipedes, also bear, like its objects from the start of the last decade, a sense that stems from the poetic exploration of a silent hybridization created by the artist in the works. His works empty out polarizations or antinomies dear to common sense discourses such as: the opposition between popular handicraft and industry or, in the case of the Remipedes, the opposition between culture and nature, here neutralized by the mutant content of the pieces in this new series.
The mutation, however, is not only the artistic reference of the works. They result from a previous mutation that occurred in their actual work process.
Whereas the objects produced drawing on the urban logic of Latin American popular consumption had an explicit political content, the current sculptures now address another myth that pervades the worldwide artistic vision of our continent: a place where nature and culture are intertwined.
Unlike the previous objects, almost always framed by the boards, and thus still contained in a support, albeit an unconventional one, the Remipedes are inscribed like loose bodies in space.
The mutations that resulted in the Remipedes are already insinuated in the hybrid aspect of their denomination. Some of the sculptures presented here possess a revealing morphology. They are visibly derived from the basic design of an oar (remo in Portuguese). The mutation in question is that of an artefact essential to human history, a product of culture, an artefact that gains life when transformed into almost an organism, neither vegetable nor animal. The use of various types of wood, primarily in these artefacts, warms its organic element and, combined with the title of the series, presents us with some challenges.
The artistic transformation of the man-made objects into mutant entities with no utility, seeing as they have become almost alive, leaves us in no doubt. This is, if we focus purely on the title given by Rodríguez-Aguilar to the works, an operation of naturalization of culture, of the mutation of an functional object into an exotic device of tropicality.
But there is an inverse path suggested by the denomination of this set of works, which comes about in the very act of producing them. The objects from the early 2000s and the current sculptures also differ in one crucial aspect. Whereas the former were distinguished by the appropriation or production of objects morphologically determined by a specific cultural context (poverty and violence), the Mutant Remipedes sculptures, although exploring naturalization, only exist thanks to their poetic invention and materialization by the artist’s action. They do not result, therefore, from a process of natural selection, but rather from an artistic-poetic operation that returns these mutants to their cultural origin.
Fernando Cocchiarale
Rio de Janeiro, March 2011