The foreseen cycle of death and the actual repetition of the sinister chaos are drawn on the walls of the room. Their reflection on the bright surface of the enameled cement floor duplicates their power. The supposedly safe space of powerless spectators is seemingly invaded by collapsing hills that appear to slide from the vertical wooden panels. The room’s floor dark horizontality anticipates the future time tracks from entirely unwise and ambitious interventions.
Image multiplication serves to loudly denounce the problem’s scale, the haphazard spread of some kind of pathogenic organism that devours the Earth’s surface with no chance of healing wounds whatsoever. The reddish pustules that replace the green and vital carpet give way to deadly landscapes reminiscing death by military camouflaged clothing images belonging to those who actually trigger the phenomenon while disguising an inconsistent attitude that actually causes the unexpected ecological disaster of unmanageable proportions. Ethical issues turn as dark as the installation’s floor. New actors are involved in a military conflict. Camouflaged landscape allows the apocalyptic intervention and entropy of another latent presence.
The interior landscape that emerges in the third installation crudely exposes the value deeply embedded in the piece: war, the arms industry, money, the economy’s selfish interests, formerly evoked by Atahualpa’s reckless treasure legend. Life turned into merchandise, vile object likely to be redeemed by artifacts -gold, lead, drugs- or false ideals and illusions that have irreversibly upset the natural balance.
The origin of modern thought’s yearning can be located in the rational attitude of mankind that has led to a positivist mathematical perspective of the world. Man’s sensible nature has been destroyed and substituted by an artificial world farther than ever from human core essence. Isolated deviant landscapes ruled by technological standards are increasingly idealized by mainstream media coverage despite their promotion of human alienation. The Entropies triptych addresses the issue in addition to the irreversible destruction of landscape. The art-piece transforms architecture as it successfully installs in a nice traditional house to demonstrate the intention of restoring harmony and overcoming human’s arrogant attitude as a way to recover the poetic sense of nature. “Spellbound in geography and spellbound in history, the inhabitants of this fragile planet prefer to ignore the rifts that crackle its’ lacerated skin while we are immersed in the narcotic laudanum of our rapt homes”. As a result, universal conscience goes unnoticed for most of us, inhabitants of this attacked and endangered celestial body. “Entropies” condemns the “man vs. nature” motto by means of a visual proposal that is more an artistic heroic act.
Article appeared in the exhibition catalog Entropies at Casa Tres Patios, Medellín, March 2009.
What is chaos about? Isn’t perhaps what we call order, nothing else than the imposition of non-natural forces? Perhaps chaos is actually a natural condition. Human fear to the natural and uncontrolled imposes artificial response to anything that tends to a different kind of logic, away from nineteenth-century modernist, rational and omnipotent wisdom. As a matter of fact, entropy indicates the impossibility to control and arrange the uncontrollable, that which has its own anima, an unknown self -will and destiny- rule.
The intellectual and visual work featured in this art proposal on the landscape, intervened with the perplexing tinge of modernity and infinite development, reveals the human inability to live in harmony with the environment, thus becoming a destructive instrument; a destructive force of meaning, of world, of the world and life itself.
The Entropies triptych stands on a sensible production of spirit that addresses landscape and accordingly approaches Hegel’s idea of beauty because "[...] the natural rises towards the spirit." The work re-elaborates the images to turn itself into a new landscape that glimpses into the confines of human unconsciousness that is leading the planet and the human species to the brink of extinction.
Entropies
ARQ. MG. JUAN DAVID CHAVEZ GIRALDO
Asociated teacher, Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Urban landscape installs a series of elements that systemically address countless topics about the unstoppable virus of a global ‘auto-mobilization’, evidencing that we are witnessing today the desertification of the planet and the construction of the megalopolis. The composition accomplished after an aerial photography of a vehicles cemetery, brings to mind the idea of playful games, of the magic labyrinth, of the spellbinding kaleidoscope which visually transforms reality into easiness of events and into children's play by way of scale transformation and the inversions of inside-outside and dominant-dominated. By stepping on a territory populated by vehicles, the viewer regains the ability to control the uncontrollable: the car turns from being the invader to become invaded. However, the two altarpieces with the geographical image of the Earth poles plagued by the same disease are able to blur boundaries, barriers and borders to highlight the unstoppable colonization process that has completely transformed the world’s geographical, urban and cultural landscapes, with no distinction as to continents, time or space; creating the context we inhabit, thus defined, thought about and driven by it.
The automobile turned into media code, is the machine that allows multicultural contacts within democracy, supports the achievement of the legitimate desire of possession of an artifact which grants dominance and provides a picture of status. The car paradoxically becomes an antidepressant bubble to escape from suffering the desperate landscape condition created by it. Thus, automobiles motivate the conquest of territory and allow taking possession of empty space, letting know the fear of nature in its primitive state. The car then appears as a work against nature, invades it to impose a sort of refinement and rationalization of nature, as if it were incomplete or faulty.
The video projection alchemically transforms the inside to outside, preparing the visitor from the approach to the exterior wall of the exhibition venue; a glimpse allowed to the viewer as the inside emerges through the outside experience. The projection’s vivid picture contrasts with the latent death of soil drenched on the floor surface of the first enclosed space calling attention to the ambiguous status of the new landscape whose central character indelibly bursts while lacerating the territory’s skin.
In the second installation the earth’s surface wounded by vehicles is transformed by an equally destructive agent, this time with an illicit character that brings it closer to another landscape dimension. The irreversible tragedy appears in natural ecosystems being altered by the aggressive and insensitive deforestation to allow ‘coca’ plantations. The cyclically repeated tragedy makes presence in the work by unrelenting cloning of pieces that put together the polychrome image of the catastrophe.