www.elainelevyproject.com
No Compromise presents a group of heterogeneous pieces, diverse both on their materials aspects and on the spirit or mood behind them. Drawings, paintings, video-animations, and photographs portrait dubbed characters and re-enacted a number of real and mediated situations. To this extent No Compromise refers to the constant slipping between different media and also to a position that resists to be incorporated or framed into pre-established categories and systems of thought. Instead of being cashiered, it maintains an open state that allows the incorporation of new relations and seeks to account for what is external and different.
The painting Flash Piece depicts the documentation of an early work done in 1970 by the Irish artist James Coleman -an empty dark space is flashed every time somebody walks in- as a live time-based piece the photographic documentation lacks everything, which is important to imagine the experience of the public. Paradoxically, the painting portraits the impossibility of a media (photography) capturing its own specificity.
The question about the possibility of the images appears in To Silence Friends and Foes Alike, a work that has purposefully engaged different resources, besides gathering until today the participation of more than 30 volunteers. Thirty something portraits of different people wearing a costume of me, is the subtitle of a series of pictures that show the moment of the same action repeated in different places. The costume -made of photographs, plastic and cotton cloth- is the pathetic and childish testimony of a manipulation that, for me, is more serious than what good humor can get to conceal.
The trick the costume hides has nothing to do with knowing if the thirty individuals did or did not really wear the suit of myself; in fact, when the mannequin is not present, the pictures seem to portray me behind a see-through plastic window. This ordinary illusion, which works even when avoiding the use of any type of digital manipulation, limits itself to the moment when a common man is taken to the entelechy of disguising as someone else, and to register a sequence that may be endless.
In the animation project based on the film classic The Exorcist, starring Linda Blair as Regan, a devil possessed teenage girl. The original sequences were re-edited and hand-drawn frame-by-frame, creating animation cells from more than 400 pictures. The work, already depicting the bizarre act of exorcism, addresses issues of copyrights and re-enactment, and attempts to comment on the disparity between blockbuster Hollywood entertainment and low budget, arcane cinematic technique.
As an installation the project was specific to Santiago; the title Reagan, 1973, alludes to the year when both the film was released in the U.S., and the military coup, led by General Pinochet, took place in my home country of Chile. More than giving an account of historical facts, the work speaks of my personal experience and a number of surrounding sensations during that period, including the encroaching North American cultural presence in Chile and the surreptitious position it has played in Chile's political history. The certain inconvenience of the title (Nixon was president in 1973, not Reagan) points to the gap between what Chileans experienced as the real event and the sense we made of it afterwards.
Regardless of the individual motives or themes alluded in these pieces, they all work as a reflection about themselves, not so much in relation to their intrinsic qualities but rather as a paradigm of the imaginary and elusive aspects of the real.
FRANCISCO VALDES
Francisco Valdés was born in 1968 in Santiago, Chile. He lives and works in London.
He studied Fine Art in Chile (School of Art Catholic University 1988-1992), in London (1998-1999) and in Maastricht (Jan Van Eyck Academie, 2003-2005).
Francisco Valdés took part to « Produciendo Realidad » at Fundazione Prometeo in Lucca (Italy), « Fantasmatic » at the Millenium Museum of Beijing (China), at the Esplanade in Singapore and at the National Art Gallery of Kuala-Lumpur (Malaysia) in 2004, more recently Prague Biennal (Czech Republic, 2005), « Strangely Family » et AR/GE Kunst Galeire Museum of Bolzano (Italy, 2005) or even « Constant Disturbance: On Cultural Contamination and Foreign Agents » at CCE Miami (USA, 2006).
"No Compromise" is Francisco Valdés' first show in Belgium.
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the gallery looks fantastic, dear
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