Fernando José Pereira
Utopia is Now
17-12-2016 | 04-02-2017
The idea of journey and exploration became, in our globalized and mass-tourism times, a common way of being. Artists introduced this notion as a way of acting, as some kind f new media is this post-medium epoch. A measure that escapes the traditional designation but ensures its vitality as a conceptual gathering of work produced by artists, and therefore, is in the actual centre of medial contemporary nomination (Rosalind Krauss calls it, very accurately, differential specificity).
The artwork presented here is an integrant part of a body of work that I designate as “The artist as an arctic explorer”, which is a result of several journeys to the Arctic on the last few years. The interest in the Arctic on my work appears in an almost natural way. Most of my work has as main motive f interest the nature of a double...condition: on one hand, as a utopian concept and, on the other hand, a dystopian notion. The last, has been responsible by a strongest approximation to spaces that present themselves in a precarious way and in a condition that I call obsolescence. The Arctic appears in our times as an obsolete place. A place that is in agony. The narratives that I create (in photography or in video or in installation) do not intent to be absolute truths or critical postures about the subject, but instead, totally exterior visions of these moralists conditions, just visions the present themselves to the public to be seen.
The title of this series, leads directly to a condition inherent to art which is risk. A parallel situation happens in the arctic exploration in which the participants, so many times, put their lives in risk for the purpose of their adventures. Somehow, phonetics takes care of empirically making that association: if we read the title we realize immediately that the sound of the word art can be found in the words artist and arctic (that only since the XVII century it contains the actual silent c).
The actual precariousness of the Arctic determines the reasons the keep working in this project. The fictions that I have been building can be understood also as “monuments” that look at the memory without prejudice. It’s with memory the history is made, and as such, our lives.
This year celebrates the 500 years of the publication of the book “Utopia” by Thomas Moore. Barnett Newman’s paintings “The Sublime is now” is from 1948. The meanings game between the two components, art and arctic, is present again. It’s with it that the artwork wants to actively dialogue. Because dialoguing actively is, nowadays, almost utopic and on the other hand, sublime.
Fernando José Pereira
Entrada actualizada el el 09 dic de 2016
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