2014

Freeing up a space for dysfunctionality and meaninglessness.

Gustavo Emé has been paying attention to the city of Lima in recent years, translating his interest into elaborate images organized by reusing the syntax of Paracas mantles. His works have oscillated between a careful drawing that shows a taste for the manual and baroque compositions made digitally, although with intentionally rudimentary programs and styles. As if the technology was taken full advantage of showing its ability to look archaic.
This time Emé begins to experiment with space and materiality beyond paper and ink, whether Chinese or printer. Appreciation for the draftsman's work remains, but his results dialogue with apparently meaningless furniture and elements taken from nature: minerals, sand, horsehair. The wooden structures support the drawing, allowing an interactive relationship with the viewer, as if inviting them to play with it. Its disposition expresses a playful will, linked to what we can intuit in the artist's rite when drawing: letting oneself be carried away by textures, patterns, equivalences that seem to obey an unconscious pleasure, rather than seeking a premeditated objective. He thus shares his process of experimentation, his own process of freedom. Appropriating an ancestral aesthetic to nurture it with contemporary elements, synthesizing recognizable architecture and reproducing symbols of local institutions, such as municipal coats of arms, stripping them of their solemnity, emptying (even more) their slogans. Perhaps producing a cross between what seeks to remain in time, through cultural officialdom, and the loopholes to enjoy the maladjustment, to get lost in urban, visual, conceptual drifts.

We are facing the remnants of a city that appears fragmented and without subjects. We recognize a Gothic church, a modern building, the guard house of some wealthy district, a motorcycle taxi devoid of its characteristic color. The animality that plays in the title with the word Lima, also appears subtly scattered: the legs of our neighbor the buzzard, the jaws of a snake that we do not know if it is made of a sticker, the hair of the horse and those of the artist himself that we do not he hesitated to frame them. Some of his decisions seem to want to mislead more than illuminate, interrupt the meaning more than propitiate it. It does not matter so much that some of the words written on the wood come from an ancient zoology treatise, as the fact that so many others are linked to his personal yearnings and anxieties.

Automatic writing camouflages an uncertainty that nevertheless appears to us formally. Faced with the ordered structuring of the drawings and the tangibility of the wood, there is something that seems to escape us, incapable of being apprehended by our need to find answers in the visible. The unconnected, scattered words are not infallible clues, the different materials seem incapable of anticipating the possible effect of their meeting in space, the dysfunctionality of the furniture challenges us to imagine and liberate its uses.

Emé has remained distant from the market and from spectacular art. Today that distance gives him the freedom of those who believe without expecting any retribution or specific consequence of their actions. From there you can continue to link the art to the game and you can share with us your question about what happens when you put certain things together with others. He wonders what happens to the subjectivities and the unconscious of certain animals, like us, when we inhabit a city like this one, Lima.

Eliana Otta Vildoso
February 2014.