Uchronies, Autopsies and Vendette. Jorge Ballester, Memory and Prospective

Portrait of Duchamp by R. Mutt in 1917, 2010. Mixed Technique.

Organised by Universitat de València

Produced by General Foundation of Universitat de València

Sponsored by Bancaixa

In cooperation with Martínez Guerricabeitia Trust

Curated by Jaime Brihuega and Joan Dolç

Jorge Ballester jogs his memory to remember himself and the things around him, putting them upside down, settling old scores... He does not want water to become stagnant. He then proceeds to perform his own autopsy.

Does he really do so? Or, is he just making fun of, or taking revenge on everything that precedes, surrounds or awaits him?

Basically, Ballester writes uchronies or Alternate History. If we look the term up in the dictionary, it refers to 

“a History-applied logic reconstruction that includes facts that did not occur but that could have occurred”. 

Therefore, uchronies, autopsies and vendette, subtitled Jorge Ballester. Memory and prospective, vertebrate this exhibition.

The exhibition consists of a hundred sketches, drawings, paintings, sculptures, monuments and audiovisual installations that reflect a great deal of the intellectual and aesthetic approaches which gave rise to the artist's concerns in recent years.

In defiance of the radical and endemic crisis that has daunted art creation for the past decades, and opposing to wearing the fancy dress of cynicism, which the art tribe dons, thus accepting the rules of the game and no longer believing in themselves, Ballester comes in and out of the memory of our recent artistic past. In such immersions, he finds an unfinished, frayed tapestry to mend using irony, paradox, love and sarcasm.

This odyssey-like journey leads to the most varied works, shape and subject-wise, with meanings pointing to multiple directions. Pieces loaded with aesthetic, ethical and ideological arguments somehow encode our historic present and the horizons it should head for, the horizons of progress.

EXHIBITION DISCOURSE STRUCTURE

The exhibition discourse is structured into four axes:

AT THE END OF REALITY

In 1976, Joan Cardells quitted Equipo Realidad. In the following years, Jorge Ballester continued working under the same umbrella group. First with Carrazoni and, finally, on his own. A number of almost unknown works date back to this period. They close the cycle of that relevant presence in the history of Spanish art in the second half of the 20^th century.

A selection of such works makes up the exhibition introduction. They are a bridge between old Jorge Ballester –settled down in collective memory, a relentless witness of leaden days- and new Jorge Ballester, reborn from his own ashes and willing to re-design both what could not be and what can be.

Equipo Realidad: Jorge Ballester and Enrique Carrazoni. Untitled C-2, 1977. Acrylic collage

CUBIST UCHRONIES

Consisting of sketches, drawings, paintings, sculptures and a monumental space, Ballester offers a visual reflection beyond Cubism’s self-imposed limits.

Female sex object scratching her pussy with her right hand, 2010. Acrylic painting.

Transposing the limits of Cubism but embedded into its momentum, jumping from the canvas to the poster, hybridising the imaginary of the first third of the 20^th century with its continuation, rigorously conjugating the chemistry of language with semantic alchemy... the artist unfolds a disciplined but surprising exercise for the creative subject, similar to that of Cubism.

The critical point is when we are invited to walk into a three-dimensional still life used by Cubist alternate history to cannibalise the architectural magnitude of time, at last. In other words, a still life of habitable proportions which allowed Cubism to finally show its long-awaited process vocation. A real object-container-space surrounds us physically and mentally, dissolving our status as passive subjects into it and transforming us into active objects.

IDENTITY CARDS

 When Jorge Ballester is asked what he does for a living, he usually says he is a “hartista”. “H” for “hartazgo” in Spanish (to be fed-up). He is fed up with a number of things, many of them belonging to the art domain, which apparently keeps operating as if everything were perfect.

But this irony is nothing but the production of a conceptual identity card. The identity issue is particularly concerning for him, as proved by the gallery of characters of the contemporary aesthetic adventure put together in this area.

Genuine prospective portraits of figures like Picabia, Marat, Pauline Bonaparte, Savinio, Beckmann, Pittaluga, Salmon... all of them subjected to metamorphoses, substitutions and other exercises through which they show a not always visible background.

            On the other hand, the hypocrisy of the so-called civilised societies usually causes them to erect memorials to the Unknown Soldier. Such necrolatries are genuine ritual exorcisms. They are intended to wash the blood off the hands and the conscience of those who use human beings as collateral costs of their capital gains. Ballester shows us identity cards of anonymous characters turned into combatants, unknown victims or comedians who store up, in their undiscovered identity, causes and sins. This heritage is used to either report on or pay homage to the miseries and dignity of the human race, predestined by injustice, paradox and only rarely by radiant moral alchemy. True revenge.

Portrait of Francis Picabia, 2005. Acrylic painting.

But Ballester’s political vocation always runs parallel to his plastic concerns. This is why Identity Cards also includes deliberate radiographies of our reality. Images which are already part of a tradition of committed Spanish Pop. Ballester certainly contributed to this.

The American way of life, Mickey, the loneliness of human beings in the urban jungle, our political bestiary... all of them parade in this register of identities in which the memory of our past, the image of the present and an alternative vocation merge under the same optics.

DEAR MONSTERS

The last section suggests a more intimate domain, that of Ballester's personal mythologies. A peculiar atmosphere –Mexican wrestling- has been chosen for the occasion.

With their outrageous and bizarre masks and clothing, transvestite into comic characters made of papier-mâché or shabby kabuki characters, though vulnerably human, the protagonists of this underworld are in contrast with other caricatures from the world of wrestling.

Their marginal, almost alternative background, and the peculiar aesthetics are used by Ballester to weave a microcosm whose connotations shift between a fetishist atmosphere and a philosophic micro-world. The latter adjective has been used by contemporary art in other miniature universes like brothels, the circus, the artist’s studio, etc. They are all part of an autopsy of the world and an autopsy of the "hartista" used in his construction of a peculiar Xanadu.

“Caliph”, 1989. Wash drawing

ABOUT THE CATALOGUE

The exhibition is complemented by a catalogue-book which includes not only the reproduction of the exhibits and a DVD with the documentary and the installations, but also a number of assays on their meaning.

It also includes texts by Jorge Ballester, Jaime Brihuega y Joan Dolç, Ignacio Ramonet, Javier Lacruz, Román de la Calle and Pablo Ramírez.

SPECIAL EXHIBITION RESOURCES

The exhibition discourse is enriched by the following special resources:

A) THREE-DIMENSIONAL MONUMENTAL STILL LIFEAs an extension of the section Cubist Uchronies, the sample includes a sculptured still life of monumental dimensions, located at the cloister of La Nau.

An exempt piece painted in white shows its plastic contents in relation to the chiaroscuro action of the light and the viewpoint of visitors, as a result of a combination of the motion of the sun and the viewers' position.

B) FOUR VIDEO-INSTALLATIONS

In all four domains, a representative piece is analysed through an audiovisual resource.

Of a hermeneutic nature and a dialogue-based teaching approach, four video-installations by Joan Dolç are projected on the wall. A critical preamble provides visual, non-narrative data, to encourage the understanding of the exhibition and a discussion about the rest of the pieces.

C) DOCUMENTARY

Synopsis and treatment

“Alternate history, Jorge Ballester or memory upside down” is a documentary feature with a dual goal. On the one hand, to be a portion of and complement the exhibition under the same name and, on the other, to be an autonomous film, one that can show the author's works to a wide audience in an attractive, suggestive and clear way but without given up rigour or the complexity inherent to all the pieces exhibited and to the exhibition as a whole.

Jorge Ballester’s works are anchored on reality in various ways. Sometimes directly, in an extremely explicit manner.... sometimes through mediating elements from different areas in culture (painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, etc.) which have previously dealt with the artistic object in question.

This previous consideration is the starting point and the documentary axis. At times, his works are like a mirror facing a piece of reality, or a mirror in front of a mirror left there by someone, and so on. The documentary itself operates as yet another mirror in front of a series of mirrors.

The feature does not use audiovisual language in a purely descriptive or teaching way, as usual in this type of documentary, but in a conspiratorial way and within limits, complementing the artist’s personality and artwork.

Still life 2, 2008. Polychrome sculpture in different materials.