Nicanor Aráoz Daniel Abate Buenos Aires
Nicanor Aráoz, a young man who until recently, with just a pot of cocoa and a broken shelf, devised a way to represent anguish, presents a show devoted to Hitchcock at Daniel Abate Gallery. A spirit of rupture and the eloquence persist, yet the works have a new status, they display the qualities of art that most readily finds its way into museums and also into the market. Birds (embalmed) have their raison d’etre, they form part of the work that dominates the room and evokes the film that bears that name. In the 1990s, artists discovered the visual possibilities that the cinematographic image provided, and technology facilitated the use of fragments to project them, regardless of the narration’s continuity. In this category is included, with an ever growing number of followers, the slowed down version of a Hitchcock film, “24 Hour Psycho”, directed by Douglas Gordon, which seems desperately slow. Now, while the key of Gordon’s lethargic work resides in its accentuated slowness, Araoz’ “birds” fly in the opposite direction.
The artist moves forward fiercely fast toward the present, evokes the incomprehensible attack of “The birds” and trans- ports it to the world of a youth of our days. The violence exercised by the birds is a powerful metaphor, as strong as the image of that polyester resin magma that floats in the middle of the room. In that unnamed tridimensional space that resembles a huge cloud, the acuteness of a bird’s beak with a bird pierced through it stands out. As surrealist and sinister as Hitchcock’s, “birds” invade everything and, without any appar- ent explanation, they kill each other. As announced by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century: “Man is a wolf to man”.1
The exhibition’s title, “Insolent brat”, lessens the show’s dramatic quality, but there is a rider with a ripped up body and with the “fury, anguish and rage” of the biblical Leviathan. The powerful figure, a traced image of the artist, flaunts its broken skin and some large scars worthy of Frankenstein. But the color of his skin, an Almodovarian green, is noteworthy, better suited for a toy than for this atrocious character.
The rider whizzes a chain with a toothed saw on its end. In spite of the ferocity of the image, the curve drawn in space by the chain has the grace shown by a skilled cowboy when he throws the lasso. On the one hand, it reminds us of the commercials that Richard Prince used to copy, and on the other, invites us to immediately evoke the lasso shaped semen spout of My lonesome cowboy, a manga character of the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami,2 that fetched 15 million dollars at Sotheby’s and today is a key piece of Francoise Pinault’s new Venetian Museum. Aráoz’s hybrid inspiration, like Murakami’s, draws upon the comic, which is the origin, to a great extent, of the iconic nature of the works of both, their eloquence, their effective immediacy. However, the aesthetic element is completely different: Aráoz’s plunges its deepest roots in the romantic recreations of gothic art, in its darkness and in its excesses, while Murakami’s inspiration, like a brand new Warhol, feeds on the luminous frivolity of brands.
In the meantime, the visual qualities of Hitchcock’s films, his veiled references to the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, Magritte or Hopper, or to the works of Man Ray or Dalí, contin- ue to seduce and inspire artists and also their captivating stories.
1 http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes
2 http/www.takashimurakami.com
