Treachery, language and art

These are reprocity effects.  The stratum work of art from Claudio Herrera is settled from an agreement with the audience by means of the language, that language in which we already know and that we practice automatically, that is part of our communication, our understanding, from our urbanity, it loses for a while its transparence to reappear on territories more broken in the madness, in the hysteria or in the desertion.

The painting, the second agreement, will be the grotte of that miraculeuse reappearence, but different from a mystic tale, which reappearance  will not have the shaden intangility from those catholic virgins, instead it has the calamity against and extreme from an endless raped body, turned around, crazy and transmuted, which because of effects of that contact with the infection from the world and from things, by the unknown angles that were touched it get – as well as the Sade statements or in the old beginning ceremony – the strongest of a purity that can only be got if first was part of degradation, from rape and from death.

The work of art of Herrera continues the long tradition of radicality.  His deluded dismemberment of the citizens strokes, of their territories and parcours, of its architecture, of it ideology tell us a cosmos that is shown in the static instant that follows its defeat. In fact, what is told, just like in the Altazor that belongs to Vicente Huidobro or in the Joyce from Ulises and from Finegan’s wake, first the death of any language, its final holocaust and its destruction. The human being that talks, who gesticulates and who moves in the streets of the cities and who takes the subway, and go back home, they are put together on the white fabric of his days (each of the paintings from Herrera may be seen as a closed unity, just like a day) the flowers and pomposities from a grumbler divinity that takes the shapes of little screens and phrases which do not get to end, the minimum mixed-up, from unresolved occasions, from frustrations and wishes fullfilled just in a half, and whose sum up is only the habit of fear that is called society, life together and sense.

By means of a desesperate graphisme, it seems that these works want to show us the sistematic production, irreversible and cruel from our own mistakes, from that general misunderstanding that we call language, from our death automatisme.  Death is at the end an automatic act. Claudio Herrera searches in the rests of that automatisme, at least what is still there, that it was not accepted by words. His world (the touchable : that we see on the papers, that is evident on the spot and on paintbrush strokes, in his callygraphy) it has the particularity to be adscribed to a kind of text such of oracle, and which, however, they can only exist from its disemboweling, because what he announces has to deal exactly, as the same as in the tragedy, just like in any oracle or prediction, with the fatal fullfilment of a destiny, i.e., with the accomplishment of a mistake.

That inconcious persistence, almost metaphisic of the mistake and its simbolic manifestations (the correction, the spot, the drop) makes the work from Herrera to be at the top of postmodern speech to become likely, because of its close distance to the argument, to the terrible focus, one of the productions more ortodoxs that today our artists are performing.  His temporarity is based on that he dares to talk about those so called big subjects to give shape again to the irrevocable dramacity that the history, that the fact of living and dying, that the persistence of destiny of the time are permanentely painted.  His compulsion, i.e., his spots, his painting brush about urban eco, are not only, the contemporary recreation of that incestuous and deaf dialogue that the communities under the spectrum quite divers have been stated with that inthinkable.  The ideologic production is shown here as a masking fact of this incestuous, as a new way to envelope the myth to castrate, to recover if sometimes have been possible, the heroism of a lost power.

Thus, to enter into the vertiginous labyrinth of these paintings, is to enter to a land where the curse, destruction and marginal ideas, live together on its strongest stress with the most blind of the myth, about the intemporal and about the holly.  Its bigger relative, its filiate, more than with various visual courrents of the moment, the literature is practiced as a manner of revelation, as a theater way, as a cruelty.The manifested intention is to establish an instant of the life, of the production that together we are doing, to show us then all the linguistic excrescence, wastes, and sentimental garbages that are provided for that instant.  This is the other face of representational art. The omnipresence of recognized signs in Herrera, at the same is the omnipresence of the mistery, of the deepest darkness that  automaticaly put them in action to be killed after then.  This art work is giving rise and extraordinary textuality that is thrown away the hackneyed knowledge of grammar, strategy, economy, politic, i.e., what the theory people suppose what is a text, to be an insubordination of every senses and impulses that rely upon the act of writing itself.  Its appeal cannot be other than a paradox: to build a meaning, to build a meaning, to build it by knowing that if the meaning exists, that meaning is always left behind forever by the person who created it.  In other words, this work of art, is evidently the language, but above all is the antilanguage, i.e., is demolish: an endless transmigration senses.

From this point of view, it is possible to try another interpretation, but we must say that this is an inlikely interpretation: in the Claudio Herrera’s work of art, there is no thickness, there is no depth, there is no intention, because the intention, the depth, the thickness are the hell that exists nowadays, his real panic, his unthinkable. What is built in this work of art is the paroxisme of surface, the map, the screen. Just like in Baudrillard, but specially in Van Gogh or the murdered of the society from Antonin Artaud, the surface is the interregnum of the senses, his open grave, only in it a man can commit suicide and also the sun rise from an abandones revelation when it became inminent, like death.

Since a strictely said every surface means that, the most worthless, the tiniest and the Claudio Herrera trait is to be there and work exactly where the impossible comes true. Every militer of his papers, every dot, is abysmal, since along with providing us the key of something that is truly there, that want to tell us that is also the hole of an unstoppable bleeding. In that way, using an image, the surface of the work of art that we are looking at has a behind and an in front, that behind and that in front we will never be able to see, because is ours. Own body, shapeless of our desires, the death-throes to know that we are going to die with nothing already revealed, and without revealing anything.