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appear at all times. We can detect something similar in Zhang Huan, or in the
Baroque-ism of Wolfgang Tillmans drawing from Arcimboldo, in Carmen
Calvo and in the work of Kuitca.
As this happens, we continue to feed the ruin with a constructive abyss,
always without time to reflect on our condition, on our identity. Meantime,
Lewis Mumford wonders: “Will the city disappear or will the whole planet turn
into a vast urban hive? – which would be another mode of disappearance”.
The result would not be far from those hackneyed news items on hurricanes
and Wall Street actions posed by Andrei Roiter or the scent of explosions and
fireworks ironically dealt with by Pedro G. Romero. Or the representations of
representations that Simeón Saiz Ruiz designs. Simeón Saiz Ruiz does not start
with photographs of reality but with the impossible photography of media like
television, and he shares a paradoxical premise with artists like Luc Tuymans:
the static image remains in the memory longer than the moving image.
The impossibility of retrieving that image, its finiteness and disappearance,
accumulates meanings whose mental equivalent develop, which does remain and
is increasingly in motion. We are talking about a painting of ideas, a painting
that is not at all innocent, that is capable of transmitting the incongruence of
the world of the media, its virtual veracity. We are also talking about a kind of
painting that emerges from a slow process: first he photographs the television,
then the resulting image is photographed again several times to be precisely
extrapolated onto the canvas, reproducing each pixel with its exact chromatic
values. The concrete seems to melt into a kind of abstract tapestry, but the
memory of violence does not; it remains intact. In the works by Simeón Saiz
Ruiz, the scene gets back the narrative and informative capacity of the painting
of history, even when it is done based on a criticism of the current mechanisms
through which information is transmitted.
In short, it is as if progress ends up devouring us. We might think about
the Klee painting Angelus Novus and the words of Walter Benjamin: “It depicts
an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he
is fixedly contemplating (…) His face is turned toward the past. Where we
perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling
ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet (…) The storm irresistibly
propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of
debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” That
progress is a kind of contemporary abyss which can be seen in art through
colour, through form, but also through scent, that which smells and that
which is imagined. Because all bodies have smells to which they are joined by
an umbilical cord, that of sensation.
David Barro
Curator of the exhibition – Director of Luis Seoane Foundation
Artist‘s texts
Eugenio Merino
The Smell of Art
The senses are the most reliable medium through which to understand the
meaning of the artwork. In contrast to reason, the senses offer us veracity.
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