ABC Contemporary Art Scholarship at Gachi Prieto

The American writer Herman Melville wrote a magnificent text about resistance and dissidence entitled "Bartleby, the scribe." The protagonist - a gray notary - from one day to the next before any order or requirement begins to respond "I would prefer not to do it" (I would prefer not to) and from then on he does not do anything. Bartleby interrupts the logic of capitalist production, and that is unforgivable. The story, of course, does not end well for him, Bartleby dies of inaction.

Bartleby is a dissident, a resistant - if not a melancholic - but his resistance is not transformed into resilience; It is a path of self-destruction.

The true artist is undoubtedly a resistant, someone who goes out of the norm, someone who does something outside the established, the crystallized, although, in our time, the imperatives of "professionalization" seek to incorporate it into logic From the market. The artist is a resistant and very particularly it is in countries like ours that often produces strong setbacks in the field of culture. Paradoxically, these setbacks reproduce exponentially the artistic manifestations, because the artist is a resistant and a resilient.

Art is then the key to resistance against a dehumanizing system, a meat grinder that leaves little standing. The artist's path is not that of Bartleby, because the artist chooses to do, but what he does is not what the system wants.

The seventeen young artists that make up this show are a clear example of optimism and resistance. They have not chosen the easy path, that of the production of what the system requires, nor that of inaction, they have chosen, as Don Juan de Castaneda would say, "a path with a heart", and that path will give them a dignified life.