BABAS DEL DIABLO
In this work titled “Babas del diablo” I try to make a fusion of the aesthetics of the artistic works “La ciudad de knopp” by Luis Benedit, 1965, “Juanito con Pescado” by Antonio Berni, 1961 and “Hommage a ` Barbaud (Tribute to Barbaud)” by Vera Molnar, 1974 with that of elements of popular culture such as the manga “Uzumaki”, Junji Ito, 1998 which talks about a Japanese town that is cursed by the presence of demonic spirals that cause damage and madness in the town. I also took as inspiration a characteristic mural from the “Plaza Miserere” station on the “A” line made by Jiant, Guiviro and Martin Ron, which always caught my attention, not so much because of the figure of the giant monkey with a baby wearing a mask but because of the gray landscape of a city almost in a post-apocalyptic state, in ruins, polluted and on the other side a turquoise river or lake. The name of the work also refers to a story by Julio Cortázar and a song by the Indian Solari and the air conditioning fundamentalists.
Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development
When I began to consider the idea of my work, I had a clear intention of mixing the works proposed in class with some type of artistic aesthetic that I like. At first I wanted to take different album covers as a reference but I made the decision to be inspired by a mural made by Jiant, Guiviro and Martin Ron that I found at the Plaza Miserere station that always caught my attention, especially the way it represents the city, the gray and dull houses. The decision to do this reminded me of the quote “We will know how to transport and Reconstitute in any place the system of sensations - or more precisely of stimulations - that any object or event provides in any place. The works will acquire a kind of ubiquity. Their immediate presence or their restitution at any moment will obey a call from us.” From the text “the conquest of ubiquity” by Valery, Paul (1928) since it made me think about the legitimization systems of art, to ask myself the questions: What value do artistic works have in museums? Do they have more value than those we can see in our daily lives? Why are they there? Are they in museums and/or galleries because they are more artistic or more aesthetic? Who defines these questions? Looking at the works of the proposed artists, the artistic works “The City of Knopp” by Luis Benedit, 1965, where I see the city with almost circular houses full of color, and “Juanito con Pescado” by Antonio Berni, where I see the city less detailed and more square, 1961, caught my attention. darker and more terrifying context to the landscape so I chose to fill the sky with spirals as in the art of history and make them move in strange ways. These spirals reminded me of the work “Hommage a ` Barbaud (Tribute to Barbaud)” by Vera Molnar, 1974 and I decided to try to recreate its figures in the windows of the buildings in my work.
When the work was almost ready I began to reflect a lot on the text “The visual languages of modernity: collage, assemblage and montage” by Simo Mulet, Toni (2008) and I was caught by some quotes such as the definition of assemblage that says “the notion of accumulation of disparate elements, the Constitution of heterogeneous parts, which separately maintain their own identity, but which can also function when they are assembled” or when collage is defined as “ the simultaneity of mental states in the work of art.” These quotes made me reflect that although my work is far from being a collage or an assemblage, it maintains certain similarities since both fulfill the notion of generating a balance with the different elements and also with the notion that each element individually has its meaning but at the same time together in my work they can acquire another.
The last reflection I made, especially when I decided to include the vera molnar spirals and squares, was that more than being inspired, what I was trying to do was copy and paste them into my work. Since this is not possible with my knowledge in the program, I ran into my limitations when trying to recreate them, but the intention was to take something foreign to the work and include it.
Literature
“la conquista de la ubicuidad” de Valery, Paul (1928). “Los lenguajes visuales de la modernidad: collage, assemblage y montaje” de Simo Mulet, Toni (2008).