Down

Galleria Zonca & Zonca, Milan
Through November 10

Sex and violence serve as the most obvious common thread linking the work of the exhibition’s six participating Hispanic artists. Hailing from different generations, Txomin Badiola, Alonso Gil, Enrique Marty, Bernardi Roig, Domingo Sànchez Blanco, and Santiago Sierra all seek to portray, without recourse to stereotypes or clichés, the moments of weaknesses and defeat, the never-realized schemes of today’s society: everything that thwarts any possible surge of optimism.

In his video-documentary An Error Occurred (2001), Gil monitors the uncertain relationship between the characterful hobos that animate the streets of Seville and the on-the-spot “philanthropists” whose paths they cross. Reassured by the obvious differences between themselves and the tramps, passersby are nonetheless unsettled by their pestering and happy to pay up so as to be left in peace.

If exclusion and rejection lurk behind the tramps’ frozen stares, it is isolation and perversion that illuminate the glowing eyes of the man hanging on the wall in Roig’s piece, Homo. With his trousers half around his ankles, Roig’s Homo, like one of the anonymous men in a George Grosz painting, eternally on the trail of a woman-object, is so consumed by desire that he becomes a symbol of voyeurism at its most abandoned, a victim of his own inexorable longing.

Like scenes from a horror film, the images on Marty’s canvases make us witnesses to scenes of sickening violence, fantasies offered up as a means by which the morbidly curious public can satisfy its sadistic streak: displayed is a mother attempting suicide and two young boys fighting, who end up disemboweling each other with a crucifix. The last painting in each series, however, lays all bare and reveals the narrative’s fictional nature.

Badiola’s photographs of interiors conceal, mostly erotic, manifestations of a replicated Self dispersed among everyday objects, while Sànchez Blanco encloses Eros and Thanatos, pleasure and violence, inside a modern-day Houdini’s box, sealed with sexual symbols and personified by the head of a pit bull with golden canines.

The show comes to a close with the work of Sierra, who adapts the themes considered in the rest of the show to his own personal approach of artistic warfare. In Sierra’s work, man himself becomes a consumer object. The social dropouts that the artist recruits to take part in his performances are “remunerated” bodies, consumer fetishes that are as equally prepared to stage a group masturbation, as to be tattooed with a wound-like line across their backs.




Milovan Farronato
Translation by Rosalind Furness