Andrés Michelena

As he himself recognizes, this exhibit shows a voluntary detachment from the spectacular gestures that characterize a certain acclaimed sector of contemporary production (Damian Hirst, Matthew Barney’s series Cremaster) and starts a journey which, challenging the saturation of images, proposes the method of a Zen garden, in terms of a compositional structure in which completeness is constructed through the balance of the minutest details.

Michelena developed several bodies of work: a series in which drawing is the faint vestige of a moment of revelation; works in which the treatment of shadows transforms the pretension of grasping reality into a smile; a video in which a line that has just appeared is as unpredictable in its course as it is faint, and yet it is unchangeable; and a group of found artifacts which he encapsulates in acrylic, a material that is a substitute for glass, in such a way that it seems they will only be able to host the void forever.

The thread that connects all the pieces is linguistic, conceptual, and it is included in the exhibit in an explicit way, in the manner of an open code for the viewer. On the one hand, he clarifies via a shelf the dual meaning of the word “content” in English, which alludes both to the actual content and to the state of contentment. In the atmosphere of the exhibition, where there is no room for excess, each piece explores a formal solution for the content in which the void has an essential value and an attitude that ultimately constitutes an essay on artistic contentment. If, according to the definition we may find in a dictionary, happiness implies “a frame of mind that takes pleasure in the ownership of a possession”, it turns out to be contrary to consumerism “an immoderate tendency to acquire, waste or consume unnecessary goods” so often mentioned by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle, in which the social relationship among people is mediated by images. Michelena’s essay dis- tances itself from the epic of excess in art, and resuming the Sanskrit etymology of the word “art” privileged by Duchamp “making” he develops a system of objects that explore the trace, the shadow or the void with the conviction that these conditions in which the representation of reality is silent or invisible are essential, and therefore sufficient.

The 60 drawings in pencil imply a dialogue between two labels, “make art” and “art”, derived from the mentioned definition, and strokes that explore the issue in a separate way, whether by deconstructing an object extracted from the history of art, rehearsing ways of suggesting the invisible in forms, or outlining the fleeting form of some instant the artist has lived. They operate, as the writer and curator Roc Laseca points out, as “diagrams” that interrogate the limits of representation. In like manner, by transforming into sculpture the empty spaces in the untouchable artifact, he materializes the paradox that in every representation of the real, one only has access to the structure of one’s own gaze. But his exhibition soon demonstrates that this gaze can afford sufficient contentment. An essay on happiness.