TREMORS IN PARADISE

MARCOS CASTRO & GONZALO FUENMAYOR

 

Marcos Castro, Gonzalo Fuenmayor, and I belong to the same generation. For that reason, we share the cultural baseline of our imagination which we can imagine being a geological ground from which the flora and fauna of our work as artists can emerge. We were born to witness the birth and emergence of the digital world, and as impressionable minds, we lived and breathed a political and intellectual project called “postmodernism”, characterized by postulates like Richard Rorty’s amazing maxim: “Truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.”

As a generation, we also lived in the age of proud scientism where general relativity, explained to us that time passes differently for different observers. Quantum indeterminacy teased our fantasy by suggesting that undead cats were scientifically possible and, as Einstein famously complained, god seemed to be playing dice to determine what is actually the case in the cosmos.

In more recent years, humanity has been taught that there are “facts”, and that there are also “alternative facts”. The popularization of the term “Post-truth” has both made us critical of an oftentimes corrupt media as well as it has empowered strange cults that believe that the planet is a flat disc somehow floating in space, or that quantum effects might be harnessed to improve your sex life. Our current models for cosmology suggest that space might be infinite and homogeneously dense, which means that all possible realities are the case somewhere, which would have frankly mind-melting implications that I will not try to explain here(I recommend to you, dear reader, to go to youtube.com and look up “what would an infinite cosmos mean?”).

To make matters even more unsettling, the Nobel prize for physics was awarded just one month ago for the discovery that quantum physics’ most bizarre implications actually check out in an experimental setting. It is said that this is the first time ever that a Nobel prize is given out to a discovery that renders the world stranger instead of making it more comprehensible and knowable.

All of these developments coalesce into a kind of epistemological singularity, a “post-reality” moment that our collective imagination is being pulled irresistibly towards. Like never before, humanity will be without narratives, scientific or theological grounds on which to stand and make sense of the world. Like never before, it will be clear how important the production of meaning, I mean art, is as a provider of symbolic sustenance for the human experience.

Marcos Castro and Gonzalo Fuenmayor are artists that work in hybrid languages, mixing what to others might seem like heterogeneous regimes of signs into complex pictures that realize meaningful images of the entangled world that we exist in. The works featured in this show all feature iconic categories superimposed with their antinomian, the serious and the silly, hopelessness and optimism, fields of color and linework, precariousness, and opulence. The vantage point of this exhibition is of two artists that viscerally understand the mediums they utilize as vehicles to reorganize the collective mind and make it more proficient at seeing the fragmented and compartmentalized reality for what it is: a beautiful landscape of knowns and unknowns that is nestled in an awesome and sometimes terrifying infinity of abstraction.