Man Ray at the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Colombia
The retrospective of Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitsk) at the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República de Colombia (The Art Museum of the Bank of the Republic of Colombia), curated by Marisa Oropesa, the first exhibition of this type in this country, it is a journey through the works of one of the most influential vanguard of the 20th century, which allows us to participate in the vision of one of the most poetic and lucid minds of his generation. 130 pieces that had until now been spread throughout the United States and Europe, show “how his ideas went from Dadaism to Surrealism.”
Born in Philadelphia, 1890, he died in Paris in 1976. In his grave at the Montparnasse cemetery, the epitaph reads “careless but indifferent”. Even though he is more widely known as a photographer, his work in general is that of a hunter of shadows in the hunt for the dark object of desire in that eternal game between Eros y Psyche.
Imaginer by excellence, his images have given us back evidence of what is closer, not only our deepest desires, but also our abominations.
In Le retour de la raison, there is a strange game between shadows and nudes of a sleeping animal. Along with Le violon d’Ingres, the other rich nude, transports us to the timeless seduction of the true works of art. Les Larmes, shows the frozen tears of posterity while L'heure de l'observatorire/ Lex Amoureux, projects the lips of a lover in an infinite landscape. In his work there are also kinetic objects, such as Objeto indestructible, metronome whose eye observes us as we come closer; Obstrucción, made with clothes hangers that levitate above our heads, or the irons Regalos, transformed in objects of offense; a bust-sculpture of Sade, Mr. and Mrs. Woodman, figures in erotic positions, self-portraits, pieces of that playful game of observer-observed and Cabeza antigua reflejada en el espejo, where nostalgia is evidenced in all its splendor.
Fetishist, Man Ray proposes a double game between the desired object and the object-prize that is exhibited, whether it’s called a piece, a painting, a collage, a photogram, a rayograph, or a sculpture. Either way, it is about the infinite possibilities of the dark inclination of men to translate into images their ideas, their fears, their fantasies, their most intimate desires, sublimated in time, in that which we have decided to call art.
Because his art is, more than anything, erotic, veiled or perhaps sublimated, in which nostalgia is synonymous to desire, conjugated in a tense of the eternal present, in an eternal becoming that always re-starts, and that preserves for us- along with random chance- that exquisite corpse of a surreal generation.
October 15 - January 15, 2011
Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, floor 3
Street 11 # 4 – 21, Bogotá, Colombia
