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ADRIANA BUSTOS
Antropología de la mula, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and galery
Ignacio Liprandi Arte Contemporáneo, Buenos Aires.
MIRIAM CAHN
Miriam Cahn says that she never knows, when she begins a
canvas, whether the figure is going to be a human or an animal.
She maintains that there is a profound relationship between
the species. If she paints a man with female attributes, or a
woman-monkey, or plant-humans, or body-landscapes, she is
not attempting to paint a real person but the memory or the
feelings of one. Her vegetal, human, or animal portraits, as
she calls them, are ambiguous, complex, vulnerable, and they
throb with subconscious life. Her human bodies are often naked
and androgynous, with very marked, stylised eyes and sexual
organs. The fully frontal nature of the figures emphasises the
presence of the subject. In fact, it could perhaps be said that
her subject is an excess of subject, the subject being excess
– excess beside and beyond itself, beyond identity, beyond
class, beyond sex, beyond gender, and yet hyper-sexualised
and hypersensitive. Much influenced by Rothko, she has
developed a brilliant and luminous texture, which she obtains
by applying a very thin layer of paint onto the canvas, leaving
no brush marks. Cahn attaches great importance to the way her
works are presented, likening it to an installation, improvised
on the spot and quickly executed in the exhibition space. The
arrangement of the works reflects the frenetic cadence of
performance. The choice of works presented in the 2012 edition
of the Ateliers de Rennes is an orchestrated assembly inspired
by the painter's own rhythms.
F. O. tr. J.H.
Born in 1949 in Bâle (Switzerland), lives and works around Bâle
and Bergell area (Switzerland).
Les Prairies's artists
Réédition
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.
Adriana Bustos's works establish subtle parallels between
Latin-American history and contemporary events there; they
often reveal unexpected connections. Of particular interest
is the corpus of drawings, videos, and photographs devoted
to horses, which she presents as evidence of economic
changes in the country. The animal that was once a symbol
of pride and prosperity in the Argentinean countryside
became associated, during the economic and social crisis
of the beginning of the 21st century, with the precarious
existence of the cartoneros as they eked a living, hauling
their collections of cardboard and paper around the streets
of Buenos Aires. In an extension of her research, Adriana
Bustos worked on the history of colonial conquests and their
apparent connections with drug smuggling. She discovered
that the roads out of Córdoba, where she now lives, that
have been used for more than a century by human 'mules'
(people who smuggle cocaine capsules in their stomach) to
transport narcotics, are the same roads that, from the 16th to
the 18th century, were trodden by mules exporting precious
metals. The piece presented here puns on the meanings of
the word 'mule' and superimposes the routes taken by drug
smugglers on the map of the colonial roads.
F. O. tr. J.H.
Born in 1963 in Bahia Blanca (Argentina), lives and
works in Córdoba (Argentina).
ZORN, 5./6.1.04. Courtesy of the artist and galery Jocelyn Wolff,
Paris.
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