LIGA 20: Nicolás Campodonico (Arg). Simultaneous Alternatives
Photography: Rafael Gamo
“I think about an art of the future as a fleeting artistic manifestation of improvisation, as a product of and for the moment, with no pull of immortality, like something that recalls interpretative art, the spectacle, the radio program, rather than a museum piece.”
Lucio Fontana, 1943
For me, this proposal for LIGA 20 resonates with the work and thought of Lucio Fontana, in particular the spatiality created by those neon works shaped like signs in the air, at once perishable and indelible. This proposal is also, in its own way, both spontaneous and fleeting, which through the reduplication of images presents a multiplied and expanded situation. A static piece that nevertheless produces a dynamic of constant movement through (intentionally) imperfect reflections, manifested as the unfoldings of a reality that the spectator perceives in a light and playful manner.
At the same time, the intervention is imbued with echoes of the work of Max Ernst. The framework appears that gives meaning to the scene, as in the photograph of the game of chess, but above all it generates an excerpt of reality. In his collage The Master’s Bedroom, Ernst using the overpainting technique to transform a page from an encyclopedia, painting over objects and causing them to disappear. The result is an explosion of proportions and perspectives that not by chance was included in Rosalind Krauss’s book The Optical Unconscious.
What is achieved in Ernst’s work by covering objects and bringing the background in front of the figures is produced at LIGA by connecting objects (the windows) and reproducing what remains of the context without the truthfulness of the mirror. These small operations displace the present reality to a parallel one: pre-established values are blurred, the context is reconfigured, and a new situation is established. As well as extended and multiplied, the space is subverted.
In my view, Nicolás Campodonico’s proposal for LIGA oscillates between these artistic reference points. They serve to delimit the boundaries of a piece that takes on the ephemeral, dynamic, and ethereal aspects of Fontana’s neon works, together with the manipulation and framing of Ernst.
A new situation emerges from the alteration of the original values of the context, as in the case of overpainting, and invites us to experience a reality that appears both reframed and displaced at the same time.
