19/07/2024
On View: ‘Swallowing the Sun’ by Enrique Garcia
“…Enrique Garcia’s 𝘚𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘶𝘯 presents six works that, at first, feel decidedly analog: Photos sourced from library collections in New York and Mexico as well as from a variety of magazines are crisply cut and offset by steel, aluminum, wood, and corrugated plastic. They depict highways, clocks, railway editorials, mesoamerican artifacts, microprocessors, solar corona.
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Two serpents enmesh themselves in 𝘔𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘤 𝘋𝘳𝘪𝘧𝘵, their unparsability furthered by the metal conveyor belt idlers bisecting them. The orderly arrangement of these polished tubes at once continues and breaks the snakes’ forms. Is the serpentine the present‘s dominant mode? From the parametric sinuousness of contemporary architecture or contemporary war machines down to the “friendly” rounded corners of consumer technology devices or advertisements’ typefaces, the curve conquers the outmoded modernity of rigid geometries, eliding edges in the name of the boundless—endless consumption and production, endless possession and expropriation. Shed of its skin, the industrial conveyor system’s pristine idlers reveal no underlying reality besides another surface, the wall.
Contemporary semiocapitalism aims to abolish time through the promise of the future—a resplendent paradox. In so doing, it likewise suppresses a history where it did not exist, a history of following a horizon line to “New World” longitudes to railway lines, lines which became the backbone of the highways and then the internet infrastructure that run still beside them. But nothing is endless; nothing is without origins. The ouroboros—the serpent swallowing itself—historically represented the cycle of life and death, but in it we might see a kind of foolishness, a category error: not knowing what is what, digesting the self such that nothing remains. The snake sheds its skin one last time. The conveyor belt gives. The factory shutters. The last conquered lake evaporates. Yet, it seems, it all continues, faster still.”
Text by Drew Pinsky (extract)
Pictures taken by .i.c.o.l.a.s and
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